


words all escaped (and come back damaged)

by anamatics



Series: don't blink (you might be missed) [3]
Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Aftermath of a Case, Case Fic, Crimes & Criminals, Drug Use, Gen, Organized Crime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-10
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 20:23:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 49,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1441660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamatics/pseuds/anamatics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joan Watson has an open invitation to play Moriarty's game, should she feel so inclined.  The problem is that someone else is playing a much more dangerous one.  A package arrives by bike courier, the contents are alarming, and all the best laid plans for the final elimination of Moriarty's enemies start to fall by the wayside.  There is a traitor within Moriarty's organization, and the traitor has his scope set on Holmes and Watson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. words all escaped (and come back damaged)

**Author's Note:**

> part three of don't blink (you might be missed).
> 
> warnings:mentions of sex work and drugs. also violence.
> 
> title from "all this and heaven too" by Florence & The Machine.

_Jamie lingers in New York.  It is easier than trying to return to England with the entirety of law enforcement in the city looking for her.  The city is languid in the summer heat and she finds herself staying indoors as August ripens into the gripping and full-bodied heat that Jamie has not experienced since she last went to Dubai.  She's playing coy with the NYPD as they are slowly starting to realize that she must be lurking somewhere in the shadows, given how much paper her lawyers are throwing at them.  It starts a man hunt, but it's a half-hearted one.  The heat makes it impossible to do much of anything at an expedited pace._

_So far, Jamie's army of lawyers have managed to unfreeze about ten percent of the initial thirty percent of her organization's assets that were frozen thanks to Watson's meddling and the botched Macedonia job.  It's not enough, Jamie knows, to continue operations as usual, but it's a good start.  She moves funds around as she can, transfers control of various enterprises to subsidiaries, monitors the rate at which her name comes up in certain circles.  The world that Jamie frequents knows she’s back; the world she’s desperate to avoid is dying to get their hands on her once more._

_Jamie realizes belatedly as the summer starts to wane that she wants to escape to the mountains.  The air there will be cool, breathable, and she won't feel like she's suffocating on the smell of hot garbage baking on the city streets.  The oppressive heat of the city in August was not something that she had anticipated.  It had gripped her mind, making her feel sluggish and inept as she and Westin teleconferenced with lawyers, hiding behind the anonymous curtain of the Internet and remote servers, routing her signal through so many countries it would be impossible for even the best hackers to trace.  So much had not gone according to her plans as of late.  It felt like she was fighting against a mighty enemy when all she had ever faced was her own ineptitude._

_She hates that feeling, of knowing beyond a doubt that it is her fault that things have ended up the way that they have.  She'd neglected to handle the situation with the PKE Group when it had first presented itself.  The organization should have been eliminated following the Park incident - but she'd foolishly let them continue their enterprise, and now she was faced with the difficult choice of continuing her game with Watson or knowingly, willingly, removing a threat to the pair of them.  Doing so will surely attract their attention, Jamie knows this which is what has stayed her hand for two months.  She wants to eliminate them once and for all - to make it clear to anyone who might be paying attention that her threat was perfectly clear._

_She'd start, Jamie thinks as she turns to the next page of her lawyers' most recent round of depositions that's been brought over by courier, with Marie Montclair.  The girl is recovering well, but complications happen - it would be easy enough, for a girl still in hospital, to contract something that could complicate her recovery - that could conceivably kill her._

_Yes, Jamie thinks, Marie Montclair should go first._

_Jamie sends Collins to collect her painting with careful instructions on how to transport it given that the paint has not had near enough time to dry.  She needs the zen, almost meditative act of one thousand strokes, counted out in between carefully maintained calm.  Her mind is a summer storm rolling across the plains of this infernal country and she wants the calm that comes after more than anything._

_"Does this mean you're staying?" Westin asks, as Jamie sets down her papers and presses index finger and thumb into her eyes tiredly.  He's been moping, knowing that he'd botched the Camille Vincent incident, knowing that Sheng's blood is on his hands.  He hasn't taken it well - they never do when it's a friend._

_"For a while," Jamie replies, not looking up.  She wants to tell Westin that he's done well and that he cannot blame himself for what happened to Sheng - that they could not have known. Jamie knows better than to speak the words.  She wants her organization to feel that guilt acutely though, because it will make them better – it will certainly make Westin better.  It will fill him with a rage that, with careful guidance, will fuel Jamie's next move._

_She picks out a studio space in Brooklyn, daring them to come find her if they want, and when Collins returns, some three days later with her painting, Jamie retreats to that space.  She is ever patient, ever calm.  One thousand strokes, drawing a Mona Lisa smile out of that mouth that mocks her so.  She wants to know why, she has to understand or all this will be for nothing._

-

_October –_

At first it seems to Joan as though she's walking in a dream.  She sits across the room from her therapist; fingers curled around the spine of Moriarty's stupid book, and tries to explain to the impassive face of the woman who's listened to her problems for years now why she doesn't feel particularly traumatized by Camille Vincent's death.  Her therapist thinks that watching a woman getting murdered in cold blood right in front of her should have actually had an effect on her, and Joan's floundering, desperate for the words that will not come.  She has to explain to her therapist that there’s a finality in Camille Vincent’s death.  It is a self-contained feeling, it’s done and it is over. Those feelings are the sort that Joan has never let herself be ruled by. 

"You have shown next-to-no reaction to this, Joan, I'm worried that it's going to come back to haunt you," her therapist says, tilting her head to one side. Joan has been seeing her for years now, and she knows Joan better than most people, yet she doesn’t seem to understand this, when Joan thinks that it’s pretty reasonable, given her personality.   "When you least expect it, I mean," she continues with a pointed look.  She gestures to the space between them, and it seems like miles to Joan.  A great moat of incomprehension, disguised as a tasteful rug.  "You told me that Moriarty came to your rescue when Sonny Park attacked you, and then again when Camille Vincent did.  She killed Vincent and severely maimed Park.  Why?  What do you mean to her?"

Joan swallows hotly, the book in her lap feeling like it weighs thousand pounds, pressing on her legs, crushing her under its weight.  She has no answer that she thinks she can give her therapist.  None that make any sense in her head, even.  "I don't mean anything to her," she says quietly.  "I'm an object of her interest, the same way that Sherlock was for a time.  The problem is that right now, I'm cast in the role of the shiny new toy.  I don't like it any more than you do, because I know it isn't healthy."  She shakes her head.  "She sees me as a worthy opponent, because I don't think like her, but I think the problem is that we are entirely too similar."

"That's not the first time you've drawn that comparison between the two of you, Joan," Her therapist replies coolly, cutting through Joan's poorly constructed trap.  She'd meant to distract her with the idea of them being opponents, because Joan didn't want to think about – or discuss for what feels like the thousandth time - the other thing.

She bites her lip, looks down at the book in her lap.  " _This too, shall pass_ ," it says on the inside cover.  It's an adage she's let rule her life for so long now that she almost forgets that there was a point in time where she was the one who was playing god with people's lives - and not trying to save them - trying to rebuild them by easing their pain however she could.

"I know," she says, looking up and meeting her therapist dead in the eyes.  It’s a hard admission, because she doesn’t like to admit such a thing to anyone.  She understands why Sherlock was so intrigued by her at first, why Moriarty still is.  She is a lot like them, in a great many ways, she just grew up, she supposes, surrounded by people who helped her to learn how to interact with the world in a way that both Sherlock and Moriarty did not.  "We are similar people, Sherlock too."

"Yet you don't go around murdering people."

Joan lets out a quiet laugh, thinking about how easy it would be to go down that route. She's killed before, and her world had fallen apart for her trouble and there is no denying that there is blood on her hands.  It had been an accident, yes; the worst kind of failure.  "I suppose you're right," she says, sounding and feeling almost resigned to the fact that there was truth in her therapist’s words, as always.. "I think that what I'm really trying to say is that I can see myself getting drawn in by her, even though I know that she did what she did for her own reasons, not out of any concern for my safety."

"And the kiss?"  Her therapist asks, because she's irritatingly perfective and likes to watch Joan squirm.  "There is no arguing with the fact that she seems to find you attractive."

That is a difficult pill for Joan to swallow.  She wants to say so many things, because that kiss – that kiss had been so much and it had been so confusing.  Joan doesn’t want to admit that she was intrigued at the time and still is to some extent.  She doesn’t think that she could ever commit to such a thing, or that she’d even want to, but the idea presents a multitude of possibilities that Joan has spent many months attempting to understand. 

"I don't think she knows how to be attracted to someone," Joan interjects.  She doesn’t mention Moriarty’s attachment to Sherlock, because that is another story entirely.  A story that has no place in Joan’s therapy sessions.  "She did it because she wants me to think that that's why she can’t leave me - any of this really - well enough alone. She wants me to fall into her web of lies so she can slowly suck the life from me, but she wants me to think that I was the one who wanted it in the first place."

"So what do you do then?" her therapist asks.  She’s closed her notebook, their hour must be up. Resting her elbows on her knees, she leans forward, eyes warm behind her glasses and smiles at Joan.  She’s made to push Joan’s buttons, it seems, and Joan’s grateful that she does.  Someone has to, or else Joan would be just like Sherlock, just like Moriarty, and burying her emotions so far down that it takes a master’s course in spelunking to find them. 

"Change the rules," Joan says grimly.  Not voicing that she has no idea how.

After her session is over, Joan takes the train back home and tries very hard not to think about what's been discussed in her session.  Avoidance isn't really her thing, she's much more a take the bull by the horns sort of person.  On this matter, however, she definitely feels as though she needs to be talked into actually confronting how such things make her feel.

She finds a seat on the train after the first major station stop just over the river, and stares at the blackness out of the window moodily, chewing on her lip.  It isn't that she isn't interested in such an advance; it's that she knows it comes with a heavy price, a cost that she cannot – dares not – put into words.  Moriarty doesn't do things unintentionally, and while the situation with Camille Vincent had been entirely out of her control - it was not necessarily _not_ of her own design. She'd killed Nigel Peddicort, it was the PKE Group's revenge that had Joan and Sherlock in Vincent’s crosshairs in the first place.

She and Sherlock are caught up at the center of a deadly struggle between two organizations. It's become sort of a side project for Sherlock, especially after they discovered that Phillipe Montclair and his daughter had been the victims of a failed carjacking not a day before Camille Vincent had been released from police custody and attempted, again, to kill them.  Phillipe Montclair didn't make it, but Marie had made a decent recovery and was back at NYU for the fall semester.

They'd gone to see her in the hospital, not long after she'd been shot, and she'd met their questions with stony silence and a poorly constructed story about getting carjacked in the Bronx coming home from a weekend away with her father in Connecticut.  The lies, even then, were utterly transparent and it led to far more questions than answers.  She’d turned her head; bloody and chapped lips pursed into a thin line, and had asked them to leave.

"Did you see her lips?"  Sherlock had asked when they'd left the hospital room that day.  He'd been especially bouncy, and ever-vigilant of her mood. Joan had found it irritating at the time, but looking back on it, she sort of appreciated that he was trying and was paying attention to how she was feeling.  He had been watching her like he was afraid that she might break at any moment.  "That's what happens when one has their mouth taped shut."

"And you'd know this how?"  Joan had asked, but at the grim look that had come over his face, she'd let the subject drop.

Marie Montclair knew who had attacked her and knew who had murdered her father.  She knew and she was terrified of whoever had committed the act.  Joan didn't think that Moriarty would leave a survivor and had argued with Sherlock for countless hours over this fact.  It wasn’t Moriarty’s style to go into something so rushed either, and a living loose end was just asking to get caught.  It meant, Joan argued, that there was a third, perhaps more sinister, puppet master in town.  One who also had a grudge against either the PKE Group or against Montclair personally. 

The thought sent chills down Joan's spine, even in the unseasonably warm mid-October afternoon. She'd slung her coat over her bag as soon as she'd stepped out of her therapist's building. It was far too warm for jackets.  She sat there in a cardigan, her arms wrapped around herself and her expression pensive as she swayed along with the train.

She couldn't deny that Sonny Park had done a number on her.  She could not even look at the scar on her arm most of the time, and that foolish venture to the beach had all but proven that point to her in loud, almost irritating fashion.  Emily hadn't been able to look away, and Joan's cheeks burned with the shame of not being able to explain to her best friend that she was just grateful that this was the worst of it.  She could be dead.  He could have gutted her, he almost did.

Bile wells up in Joan's throat and she looks down at her hands.  They're shaking.  She's never understood her body, how sometimes, when it makes the least amount of sense, she is absolutely calm.  She's stood with her hands in a man's chest, clutching his heart, and her hands didn't shake - but thinking of a waste of a man who cannot hurt her anymore and she'll lose all control over herself.  It’s a shameful feeling, and Joan swallows hotly, her cheeks burning with the weight of all that she still feels about it.

"You are dealing with some post-traumatic stress," her therapist had said the first time she'd confessed that she could scarcely look at her reflection in the mirror without seeing that scar and flashing back to that moment.  "But I think that your lingering issue isn't due to what Sonny Park did - or did not do to you - but rather your inability to face up to the why of it all."

But what was the why then?

Her mind drifts, rocking with the train, thinking of the panicked look in Moriarty's eyes at the moment when Joan's fingers had touched her cheek.  It had been a kiss, nothing more, a desperate attempt to create something that Joan could relate to out of whatever obsession had borne this constant need to rescue Joan.  This was twice, and each time - each time...

Joan swallows and presses her thumb and forefinger into to her eyes, a quiet sigh escaping her lips.  It couldn't mean anything; Moriarty isn't capable of change, let alone affection. Joan knows this, Moriarty’s proven it before.  They’d be stupid to underestimate her.

The conductor calls out her station as the next stop and Joan gets to her feet and goes to stand by the door, still caught up in her thoughts. There has to be something that they're not seeing, a bigger plan, a bigger picture.  Otherwise none of this makes any sense at all.

**words all escaped (and come back damaged)**

Ms. Hudson is there when Joan gets home, armed with a feather duster and a laundry basket full of freshly folded clothes that she shoves gratefully into Joan's arms as soon as Joan has hung her coat up by the door.  "Thank goodness," she says, as Joan shifts the basket into a more comfortable position in her arms.  "Sherlock is in an awful mood and I can't seem to get him to come out of his bedroom for long enough to put those away.  He’ll have to do it."

Joan looks down at the freshly folded boxers and colorful socks and feels oddly disturbed that they don't particularly bother her.  She’s used to it by now, she supposes.  It’s no different than when she and Oren were still living under the same roof.  "Why's he upset?" she asks, twisting her fingers into dryer warm clothing and barely holding in a sigh of contentment at the warm, clean-smelling fabric.

Ms. Hudson purses her lips and looks down at Joan for a moment before shrugging broadly and moving towards the stairs.  "He got a call, I think from Captain Gregson at the police station, and spent the better part of an hour glaring at your murder collage in the library.  When I asked him - very nicely I might add - to move so that I could vacuum, he stormed off into his bedroom and hasn't come out or unlocked the door since."

"I'll talk to him," Joan promises, but she does not apologize.  It's something that she's been working on outside of therapy.  She has no reason to feel guilty over Sherlock behaving like a child, and she should not feel compelled to apologize for him.  He can mend his own fences.  "Have you done upstairs?"

"Just getting there now," Ms. Hudson says, mounting the steps and picking up the bucket of cleaning supplies that Joan has taken to checking on once every few weeks, just to make sure that they're still well stocked.  "I'll be done soon, though."

"We should have tea," Joan says, desperate to not be left alone with her thoughts.  "I feel like I haven't seen you in ages."

Ms. Hudson's smile is brilliant and Joan grins at her, before heading down the hall and downstairs to the kitchen and Sherlock's bedroom.  The door is locked and Joan knocks just once before the door bursts open and Sherlock is half into a rant about how he was in very good mental place and was actually making quality observations on data he's looked at so many times it's making his hair grey when he sees that it's Joan, rather than Ms. Hudson at the door, brandishing his laundry at him like a shield.

"Oh," he says, looks down at the basket in Joan's arms.  "You're carrying my laundry."

Raising an eyebrow, Joan holds out the basket to him.  "That's enough of your underwear for me for at least a week, Sherlock.  I expect there to be pants at all times."

He eyes her for a moment, before taking the basket.  "I can make no promises, Watson."  He turns on his heel, calling over his shoulder as Joan follows him into the room, "I can never predict when I'll need to liberate myself from my pants - or when I set them on fire."

Sometimes, Joan wonders what god she angered to end up with the odious task of babysitting the world's most obnoxious forty year old five year old.  She supposes that it's her own damn fault for taking him on as a client in the first place, but he's gotten worlds better since she's stopped being his sober companion and he can respect her without constantly trying to undermine her and subsequently his recovery.  She still has her moment though, where she sees the things that she’s been trained to look for flitting across his face.  The drawn, weary way he rubs at his arms and sometimes cannot stop fidgeting.  She’s still learning, but she’s getting very good at knowing what to say to urge him to go, if he needs to, to do something other then what is reminding him of a habit he’s quit –and the addict that he’ll always be.

"Ms. Hudson said you'd gotten a phone call from the precinct?"  Joan says as Sherlock starts to toss socks into his topmost dresser drawer, basket in one hand.

His back stiffens and he turns very slowly to look at her, a pair of hot pink socks held aloft.  "You're not going to like it."

"He _didn't_ \--" Joan begins, but Sherlock nods grimly, cutting her off.

For the better part of two weeks, they'd been trying to get permission to reopen the Jacques Renard case to have another look at the evidence and to see if there was a concrete link to Phillipe Montclair.  They were between current cases at the moment, the Yankees having made the playoffs seeming to stem the tide of murders in the city at least temporarily.  The Jets were still bad though, so Joan figured that there were still bound to be some interesting cases that came their way.

"He," And Sherlock says the word with such distaste that it's pretty obvious that he his opinion of Captain Gregson has sunk a few points over this.  "Is of the mindset that unless we can present them with new evidence, there's no reason for him to reopen a case - the last thing he wants is to draw attention the fact that we're looking into the PKE Group at all."

It's a disappointment, that's for sure, and as Sherlock moves on to his underwear and shirts, Joan moves to sit on the edge of his bed.  "We know Moriarty has people within the police department, what's to say that the PKE Group doesn’t as well?" she says, voicing a concern that they’ve both had for some time regarding how private their private matters with the police truly were.

He pauses, "We've been operating under the assumption that their knowledge of Moriarty's actions comes from someone within her organization - but if they have someone within the police department as well, it would explain why Captain Gregson is so hesitant..."  He scratches at his chin, regarding her pensively, a pair of orange socks that had slipped down further into the basket in one hand.

"It doesn't explain why you're sulking though," Joan points out.  "Ms. Hudson said she simply asked you to move, Sherlock."

He waves the socks distractedly.  "Yes, yes, I know.  I will endeavor to make amends, but listen, Watson…"

"Okay..." Joan beings, but Sherlock’s already continuing over her.

"Captain Gregson told me to, and I quote 'drop it,' which usually means that he's sitting on more information than he's letting on.  I wouldn't be surprised that if we were to go looking, we would find something in that file." He says the sentence in one breath and smiles broadly, almost manically, at her, and Joan resists the urge to groan.

"Sherlock, we can't undermine his authority.  Remember what happened with Moran?  With Park - hell, with Moriarty's involvement with the Vincent case?  You're pushing your luck as it is, looking into something that's so obviously connected to her."

"Why?"  He asks.  “It is what we do, and this case if of a personal nature to us both,” he adds pointedly.

"Because you can't be objective, no matter how much you tell yourself that you're over her," Joan says.  They've had this conversation so many times now that it feels flat, and tastes bad in her mouth.  He knows it too, judging by the scowl that comes over his face.

He sets the laundry basket down on his bed and clasps his hands behind his back.  "But I'm not the one that she's taken an interest in, as of late, am I?"

"No," Joan looks down, swallows and then raises her gaze up to meet his evenly. She won’t back down from that sort of a challenge, and she won’t let him lord it over her either.  It isn’t like she’s going to fall into Moriarty’s trap.  "You're not."

They stare at each other for a long time.  Sherlock has made his displeasure at her continued involvement with Moriarty quite well-known in the weeks that have followed the Vincent case.  They'd stayed involved with the investigation, helping the girls that the PKE Group had brought to the country illegally to decide if they wanted to stay in the States or go back home.  Immigration had offered them asylum provided that they'd give statements and help with any further prosecution of the people involved - but that case had gone cold as soon as Phillipe Montclair's body had ended up on a slab in the morgue.

Sherlock knew of Moriarty's challenge to Joan, and he'd spent the better part of the three months that had passed between then and now urging Joan to not respond at all.  Joan had had no intention of doing so to begin with, but Sherlock's insight into the matter had led Joan to more than one uncomfortable conversation with her therapist.  Not to mention with Sherlock himself.  Like it or not, there was a part of him that still loved Moriarty – or the part of her that was Irene. 

It is with a heavy-sounding voice that Sherlock posits the question that he's yet to ask her, for all their arguments and discussions surround this topic.  "Do you want to play her game, should it come to that?"

Joan looks down at the laundry basket, empty as it now is.  She gathers it up in her hands and stands, meeting his gaze evenly.  "I don't know if I can play by her rules," she says with a small smile.

"That will make her angry," Sherlock points out as Joan moves to leave the room.

"She's a grown woman," Joan calls over shoulder, even though she doubts the validity of her words.  "She can handle it."

-

When her studio’s doorbell rings, Jamie starts. The motion makes her streak a line of orange harsh across the neckline that she’s spent the past two weeks trying to get just right.  She lets out a low curse and sets the brush aside, reaching for a towel to dab at the orange to try and get most of it off before it starts to dry. Already it doesn’t look right – already it looks as though it doesn’t fit and Jamie’s lips pull downwards into an irritated scowl as the doorbell rings for a second time.

Westin, should he need to come up, has a key, as does Collins.  No, this is either the building superintendent (whom she wants nothing to do with) or someone else entirely.  Either way, pretending to not be home is probably in her best interests.  Jamie moves her towel with deliberate care, carefully skirting around the layers of paint that she’s already laid down.  She finds herself caught up in the moment, mentally calculating how many strokes have gone into this one area of her masterwork, only to have her peace shattered by the bell ringing for a third time. 

She reaches across the table and picks up her gun from where it lies next to her mobile and half closed laptop.  It’s playing NPR at a low volume, and it’s late enough now that they’ve switched over to the BBC World Service.  She’s listening for something, and she’s not entirely sure what exactly, caught up in the familiar accents and the tales of international strife and chaos. 

The gun feels heavy – good – in her hands.  She likes to pretend that she doesn’t see the necessity of being constantly armed, but she does understand it and understands it well.  Ever since the incident with Camille Vincent, Jamie has taken to the old adage of preparedness the way that a dog takes to a fresh bone.  She does not want to have cause to shoot anyone, but she will not shy away from that necessity should the need arise.  The plan for her dismantlement of the rest of the PKE Group’s operations is merely days away from fruition and Jamie is enjoying the feeling of calm that comes before the hellfire that she’s about to unleash upon those fools and all who remain loyal to them.

Jamie pads with bare, silent feet, to the door.  Her hands and forearms are streaked with paint and the black of the gun’s grip is now smeared with orange and yellow.  She must look a fool, Jamie thinks, as she keys in the security code that will allow her to access the camera at the front door.  She’s had some adjustments made to the security since she’s started working out of this space, for the most part, and while it is not ideal – the security is as top of the line as it could possibly be in a largely empty building filled with over-priced artists’ lofts and some apartments, play places for the rich and famous

A bicycle currier, wearing nothing but far too tight spandex shorts and a t-shirt bearing a company name that Jamie has never heard of before, rocks awkwardly from foot to foot.  In his hands there’s a bag, a small envelope resting on top of it.  He raises his hand to buzz the door one more time, but Jamie beats him to the punch.  She hits the intercom with the knuckle of her ring finger, the only part of her hand that isn’t paint-covered (she doesn’t want to have to clean the intercom on top of her gun).  “Can I help you?” she asks, her voice cool, disinterested – _American._

“I have a package here for an Irene Adler--” The guy says after a moment of fumbling to figure out how to use the intercom.  He reads the name off of the package before glancing around, obviously looking to see if there’s a camera somewhere that he can smile and look reassuringly non-threatening towards.

Jamie sucks in a breath of air, sharp, and certainly alarmed.  There is no one to see her, no one she must pretend for, and that name is long dead.  The only people who would… “I’ll come down,” she says, and terminates the connection.  She pulls on the first pair of shoes that she finds, canvas flats that she’d bought when the floor had started to grow cold in the morning, and tucks the gun into the waistband of her pants. 

She leaves paint on the door handle, but wipes her hands off as best she can before she gets downstairs.  One hand is gripping the gun handle as she pushes the buzzer to let herself out of the front door, keys rattling in her pocket.  The courier is standing with the package in one hand, bike leaning up against his thigh.  He doesn’t look particularly threatening, but then again, neither does Jamie.  Her grip tightens on the gun and he holds out a clipboard and a pen to her.  She wants to kill him, just for mentioning the name of a ghost, but she knows it isn’t wise or practical.  No one can know of Irene Adler, not anymore.  She’s as dead as can be, Jamie’s killed her twice now.

“Sign here,” he says, indicating with the pen.  Jamie’s grip loosens and she pulls her hand back almost innocuously, as though she’d been scratching an itch, and takes the pen. 

“Sorry for the paint,” she says in an apologetic tone, using the moment the she’s plastering a sheepish smile onto her face and directing it at the courier to remember how she’d signed Irene’s name.  She draws the letters carefully, a forgery as only she knew how, and passes the clipboard back to the courier.  “You’ve caught me at a bad moment.”

It feels like all the blood in her body is pounding between her ears, and she's a little taken aback when the courier flushes and backs away, one hand on his bicycle and the other tucking his clipboard back into his bag.  Jamie holds the package that he's handed her gingerly, feeling the edges of what feels like photographs inside.  "It's no trouble," he says, his cheeks still colored a pretty shade of pink.  He flashes her a pleasant smile, spinning his bicycle around expertly and hopping off the curb and back into the late evening flow of traffic.  Jamie watches the flashing red light affixed the underside of his seat until she can no longer see it, before she turns and heads back inside.

Though she itches to open the package, Jamie knows that the paint on the grip of her gun and the door handle must be cleared off first.  She finds a rag soaked in turpentine and soap and scrubs almost distractedly at the door handle, streaks of orange and yellow fading to leave plain white and silver once more.  Her gun is trickier, and Jamie scowls and wonders if it would be easier to simply acquire a new one.

Ten minutes later she's put the kettle on for tea, her hands and gun are completely clean.  She tears the packet open and pulls out the stack of what she had correctly suspected were photographs.

 _They wouldn't be so stupid,_ Jamie scowls, her face completely blank.  She doesn't want even these photographs see her lose her cool, her resolve.

Written in black permanent marker (sharpie, judging by the smell) atop a piece of blank, exposed photo paper that's starting to purple in the studio light above her head, there is a message.  "If you think we couldn't find out about Irene Adler, you are sorely mistaken."

Underneath the first page, there are ten others, and it is the content that makes her blood run cold.  They are taken through a camera affixed to a sniper's scope, they are a perfect illustration of her downfall. Jamie flips through them, one by one, staring at each one as the mental image she's trying with all of her might not to evoke starts to swim into absolute clarity.

Joan Watson at the end of a sniper's scope, Sherlock at the end of one as well.  She has a weakness, after her best efforts to hide it, and they know about it - about _them_.  She's acted rashly, not letting they handle things on their own.  This is their revenge for Peddicort, and for Montclair.

The photographs fall to the floor and Jamie's vision is tinged red.  Whatever plan she might have been entertaining about the end of the remaining three members of the PKE Group Board dissolves in flames and is replaced by a violence that she knows well, that she’s embraced since childhood – one that she has made a living off of  - one that she truly owns.

They must think her a fool.

She reaches for her mobile, dialing Westin's number from memory.  He answers before the first ring is has finished. "We need to escalate," she says quietly, her voice razor sharp. She hesitates, just for a second, because this is not how she would usually handle a situation like this.  Normally she doesn’t care for the people involved with her people outside of their professional lives with her.  So long as they’re not plotting her demise, Jamie sees no cause to remove them as obstacles to the improved performance of her organization.  "You should move your nurse to a safe house, Westin.  _Now_."

"What's happened?" he asks and Jamie knows that she will not tell him over the phone.  Phones can be tapped, lips can be read.  She sucks in a breath of air.  "Get over here once you have her settled, Mr. Westin."  She says curtly, before hanging up.

There isn't any time.

Jamie Moriarty stands in the middle of a circle of discarded photographs, her hands shaking with rage as she stares down at them.  They knew about Irene - how could they possibly know about Irene?  Her mind casts a wide net, thinking desperately of all that she could not fathom.  The only people who knew of the Irene Adler rouse were the policemen within the 11th Precinct, Sherlock, Watson, and Westin.  Westin was utterly loyal to her, Sherlock and Watson would not very well do something like this to mess with her, and the police, as far as she knew, were fairly scrupulous in that department.  She'd been trying to get one on her payroll for years to keep better tabs on Sherlock and has made little progress.

Something isn't right here, and Jamie can't see it.  The PKE Group had an inside man somewhere, but where?

Her fingers tremble when she reaches for her mobile, types out a message, erases it.  It will not do to worry them.  Not yet.  Not when Jamie is sure she solve this problem internally.

-

"You really don't have to make the tea, Joan," Ms. Hudson is saying.  She'd stayed after she finished her cleaning, and they'd ended up sucked into a movie together, curled up on the couch while Sherlock sat on the floor in front of them and slowly clicked and tossed his way through unlocking most of his lock collection under the guise of ‘keeping his skills up’.  "You did make the last pot."

"It's alright," Joan replies.  She's standing in socks and her favorite red sweater, watching as the gas lights the burner and how the flames lick at the bottom of the kettle.  It's late now, and Ms. Hudson's already called for a cab.  They'd said it would be thirty minutes, easily, maybe closer to an hour since the Nets were having a preseason game. "I like the um..." she looks up, cheeks coloring a little bit.  "The motions of it."

"Calming, isn't it?" Ms. Hudson says, moving to sit at the kitchen table.  She folds her hands in front of her and Joan's heart hammers in her chest, thinking of another person who'd sat there, the same expectant expression on her face.  "There is something to be said for the little things in life."

"I agree," Joan answers.  She gets down two mugs and sets them on the table.  "I feel like I've lost them recently."

Ms. Hudson nods, "Given what you've been through, this year especially, I don't blame you for feeling that way at all."   She reaches forward and picks up her mug. It's faded with Joan's college seal emblazoned on the side, weathered with age and too many washings.  Joan feels a bit like it, looking at the mug.  "Do you think that you'll ever really be over it?"

"Not until I know why, I think," Joan says.  She closes her eyes, and the kettle starts to whistle.  "Do you want mint again?"

"Do you still have that passion fruit one?"  Ms. Hudson counters and Joan cracks a little smile, reaching up to pull down the box.  Sherlock buys it especially for her, when he remembers to go grocery shopping.  It's her favorite.

Ms. Hudson smiles at Joan as she passes her over the tea bag and settles into the chair beside them, the kettle resting on a trivet between them.  "What do you mean the why of it?  I would think the why's pretty obvious."

Joan swallows.  "I suppose," she says, but doesn't feel like she's committed to what she's wanted to say very well at all.  "I think it's just weird to suddenly have a woman interested in me after over forty years."

"You don't really think she is?" Ms. Hudson says, taking the kettle when Joan passes it over to her.  Steam covers her face for a moment and Joan's face falls into the concerned, pulled look that she's tended to favor in recent weeks.

"No, but she wants me to think that, and I don't really understand why," Joan replies.  She pokes her teabag down to the bottom of her mug and leaves it there to steep.  "I... wouldn’t do that to Sherlock."

"Honey, it's not like you were going to actually do anything, were you?"

She shakes her head.  "Sherlock knows that too, but I feel dirty having let what happened happen, you know?  She knew that I was in a mental place where I'd be open to the idea and she took full advantage of it."  Biting at her lip, Joan adds, half a second later.  "She wants me to play her game."

"But to what end?"  Ms. Hudson asks quietly.  She say how Sherlock was after Irene had come back, she'd met Moriarty once, briefly as Irene.  It was odd for Joan to think about that now, it had all been lies.  "Joan, I honestly wonder if the whole point of her doing what she's been doing is just to get you caught up in your own head."

"You think?"  Joan says, chuckling a little bit because she’s wondered the same thing herself many times.  She curls her legs up under herself and watches Ms. Hudson fish out her teabag, commenting quietly on how strong the tea gets and how quickly it does so.

They drink their tea in silence, listening to the sounds of the house settling, everything smelling like Pinesol and bleach.  Joan loves the clean smell, but sometimes it reminds her far too much of hospitals and all that she wants to forget about such places. 

"Would it really bother you, if the circumstances were different?" Ms. Hudson asks a few minutes later, checking her phone distractedly for the cab that had yet to come.

Joan smiles and shakes her head.  "I've never really had cause to think about it before now."

"You're lucky then," Ms. Hudson replies.  "You're an adult.  It's murder when you're a teenager."  It's the way she says it, the haunted look in her eyes that makes Joan glad that she's found them, or they've found her.  She can see how easily companionship like what they've just shared comes to her, and how obviously hard it is for Ms. Hudson to let it go.  Sherlock doesn't know anything about Ms. Hudson's past aside from her vast knowledge of the classical world, and he's never asked, he says it isn't his business.  Still, Joan wonders if Ms. Hudson has lost her family, because of who she is, and the thought makes her heart ache.

"She is pretty," Ms. Hudson says quietly.  "But totally insane."

"Yeah," Joan agrees.

The laugh quietly, and Ms. Hudson's phone rings.  The cab has arrived and Joan sees her to the door, smiling and waving when she glances over her shoulder before climbing into the cab. Joan watches as it leaves, two headlights vanishing into the city at night time, closely followed by a bike courier making his way down the road in the distance.

-

"Mr. Westin," Jamie begins, drawing the attention of her tired-looking lieutenant.  He's been pacing the length of her studio, carefully stepping around the fallen paint, remnants of her more manic creative periods of late.  He pauses, hands in his pockets and a grim expression on his face.  He is not nearly as phased by this as Jamie thinks he should be, regarding the photographs with the same careful efficacy that she's always known him to possess, but none of the worry that she cannot shake.  "What do you propose we do about this?"

Westin sighs, his heels scuffing on the floor, and moves to stand next to Jamie in the window.  "There are several options.  The pieces aren't in place for the takedown, not just yet.  We need a few more days."

He's trying not to draw her ire, and Jamie's grateful for it, but she does think that he's too blasé about this.  She knows that they cannot move on the PKE Group's last major asset in the city until at least Tuesday.  There is the problematic matter of making sure that all the outside pieces, the little bits of blackmail that she has on various police and city officials to smooth this takedown.  She's had Westin, Collins and some of her better people getting everything into place.

The PKE Group's one asset in the city, Marc Tenimont's legitimate pharmaceutical business, is also where they manufacture the surplus that has made them players in the city's prescription drug trade.  Tenimont was very good at hiding that surplus, and it made the PKE Group a pretty penny on the side.  Jamie wants it gone, she wants the company's credibility destroyed and has been working for the better part of two months to make it so.

On Tuesday there is a regularly scheduled FDA inspection at the company.  Tenimont has been in the papers recently, discussing a new drug that has some promise for early detection of cancer cells in clinical trials.  Jamie knows that Watson will be aware of it; she still keeps up with the journals because Sherlock does as well, and she's intrigued to know what Watson thinks of such a drug.  Fool's gold, Jamie thinks.  She's had her own scare and she never wants to experience confronting her own body rebelling against her again.

The plan is to have the FDA discover a discrepancy in their reporting, already sent carefully through a Trojan horse to the secretary that Jamie had spent the better part of an evening flirting with in a wine bar in the East Village two weeks ago.  They had an in, and they'd laid the trap carefully, Westin's computer guy making it very obvious to anyone who might happen to be looking for discrepancies of such a nature as the FDA would.

"We could accelerate," Westin suggests, picking up a picture of Sherlock and contemplating it for a moment, before setting it down again.  "I understand that we can't move on Tenimont's company until Tuesday and that the plan won't come to realization quickly, but we could accelerate against Wong and Norcot."

Jamie stares down at the street below and shakes her head. Her expression is absolutely blank when she announces, "I plan on killing them all, but I want them in ruin before it's done."  She purses her lips and tries not to let her worry, her frustration with her own worry, show on her face. "We need to send a message, Mr. Westin."

His eyes narrow, and then widen.  Jamie watches as he shifts nervously, his back ramrod straight and the expression on his face growing grim, resigned.  He is a practiced murderer, and he does not hesitate, which is what Jamie likes about him.  She would not hesitate to kill him, and she likes that same ruthlessness in her lieutenants.  "Montclair?"

Making an affirmative noise, Jamie leans over and picks her gun off the table.  It feels good in her hands, heavy in the right sort of way.  "I think yes," she says.  Tenimont has been keeping an eye on her, as have Sherlock and Watson.  Jamie's had this planned for almost as long as Montclair has been out of the hospital.  She ejects and checks the clip, snapping the safety off and loading the first bullet into the gun's chamber.  "Get the car.”

She will not allow Tenimont to get away with such a grievous threat against her.  A threat that exposes far more than her weakness, but rather a past that no one save Sherlock and his Watson can know.

Shrugging on her coat, Jamie gives a mirthless chuckle.  Soon, she won't be Sherlock's Watson at all.

Marie Montclair's sizable inheritance has afforded her a nice apartment on the Upper West Side.  It doesn't face the park, because it wasn't that big of an inheritance, and she shares the apartment with a two rent-paying friends.  Friends that, a quick check on Jamie's mobile and the bugs that they'd planted in the apartment before Montclair had even moved into the place, are not at home at the moment.

"Are we framing anyone for this?"  Westin asks from the driver's seat of the town car, glancing over the half-closed partition.

Jamie closes her eyes and turns off the screen on her mobile, tucking it into her pocket.  "No, Mr. Westin," she says.  Typically she would make Marie Montclair disappear, but they haven't the time for that.  Tenimont escalated, and he knew things that very few people aside of the few that Jamie trusts more than the others, he cannot be allowed to continue down this dangerous path.  Eliminating the daughter of his best friend is the only option to keep him in line until Jamie can ruin him and murder the rest of his cohorts before his eyes.

"Holmes will figure it out," He points out and Jamie looks down at the gun in her gloved hands.  "He's smart as a tack that one."

"Perhaps," Jamie says, knowing that this gun has been stolen from a very expensive penthouse that overlooks the city and she knows who's used it last.  "The evidence, Mr. Westin, will speak for itself."

She murders Marie Montclair in the night, standing in her doorway with Marc Tenimont's gun.  The girl sees her and her expression is horrified before Jamie pulls the trigger, silenced shot burying itself between Marie's eyes.  _It's a shame,_ Jamie thinks afterwards, as they carefully close the door and leave the gun where it will be found in the laundry room trash in the basement.  Marie Montclair had so much to live for, after all, but Tenimont and the PKE Group had forced her hand.

They had someone on the inside of her organization and it means that Jamie is going to have to draw back, into her head, keep her plans secret to keep herself safe.  Westin's been running point on this take down of The PKE Group's legitimate business; he's not going to like being shut out.

Jamie supposes that she's already lost one good lieutenant to this war; a second one might be an acceptable loss.  She will kill Westin if he objects; she will not tolerate that kind of insubordination.  Not now, and not ever.  Westin's lived this long because he knows that and has a healthy fear of her retribution.

Perhaps it is that fact that has Jamie apprehensive. Westin has been questioning her decisions for months now, and she's let it slide.  She should have taken a firmer hand, shut him out.  She'd thought about it, with Collins coming back to work.  It had fallen by the wayside, she'd been so caught up in the PKE Group, in Joan Watson and her defeat at the hands of one she'd considered so utterly inferior to herself.

Everything is easier in retrospect, and as Jamie gets into the car and directs Westin to drive her back to the hotel she's been living out of for the better part of the summer now.

She'll decide what to do with Westin when he pushes back too hard.  Until then, she will bide her time.

-

Joan's mother calls her at six thirty the next morning, and by the time Joan is dressed and absolutely sick of hearing about how Mrs. So-and-So's son from her high school is single still and a lawyer to boot, it's close to eight.  She heads off on her morning run and is grateful that the sun is shining and the temperature is hovering around fifty degrees.  She likes these October mornings, where she can still pretend that it's nice enough outside to want to be outdoors, and not fueled by a need to exercise that she cannot ever fully reconcile as being an addiction all its own.

She takes a longer route than usual, cutting through sleepy neighborhoods on a Sunday morning, her lungs burning as she sucks in cool air.  She stops at a bodega in Red Hook to get a bottle of water, hovering on her third mile, and decides which way to go back as she drinks it.  She loops down a few blocks and adds an extra mile to the return trip, blood pounding in her ears and her mind blissfully blank as she makes her way up the steps to the brownstone's front door.

She has breakfast and stretching on her mind, it's a Sunday morning and Sherlock won't be up to much for a few hours.  He tends to sleep in one day a week, Joan's noticed, usually on Sundays. She's always chalked it up his acquiring ridiculous sleep debts while on cases or during the week, arguing with teenage nerds on the Internet until all hours of the morning and conducting loud experiments to the sounds of the 1812 Overture to cover up the fact that he was shooting his single stick dummy again.

It surprises her that he's awake as she pads barefoot into the kitchen, halfway through stretching her arms over her head and trying work out the soreness that's settled in her side.  "You're awake," she says eyebrows up as she takes in Sherlock, picking the raisins out of his bowl of dry Raisin Bran and putting them back into the bag.  Why he doesn't just buy Wheaties is beyond Joan's comprehension, they're basically the same thing.

"Got a call from Detective Bell," he says, scowling. "There's been a murder on the Upper West Side," he adds, reaching for the milk, apparently satisfied that his Raisin Bran is officially raisin-free.

"That's a little out of our jurisdiction," Joan says, leaning forward and stretching out her calf.  "Is it related to another case we're working?"

"He said yes," Sherlock says.  He jams a spoonful of cereal into his mouth.  "The residence is rented in Marie Montclair's name, victim is a female, mid-twenties, probably a student judging by the contents of the apartment."

"Marie Montclair?" Joan says, taking the spoon from him when he gets up, halfway through the bowl and moves to put the kettle on.  "It isn't her is it?"

"Bell wasn't able to provide many details, as he hadn't been to the crime scene yet," Sherlock says as Joan eats a few bites of his weirdly raisin free cereal.  She crunches as he fills the kettle at the sink.  "He'll be here in half an hour; I was going to call you if you weren't back soon.  You've just enough time to shower, I’d say."

"Make me a cup of Irish Breakfast," Joan says to him, passing him back his bowl and heading out of the room towards the stairs.  Her mind is racing, because if Marie Montclair is dead then the entire nature of this case is going to turn on a time and they might be able to continue their investigation.

Not to mention that it opens them all up to some very uncomfortable questions.  Joan strips off her running clothes and stares down at her phone.

She'd saved the number that those texts had come from Moriarty back in July, when Camille Vincent was so obviously after them and Moriarty was trying to stop her.  When Joan is at her most honest with herself, she'd saved the number because she'd known then, as she knows now, that there are still remaining members of the PKE Group and that they're doing their absolute best to remain out of the spot light. Joan wants to be able to contact Moriarty if it seems that they're making another push into the city.

She eyes her phone now, silent and charging still, her mind hazy.  Moriarty is such a complicated figure in her life now, and Joan knows better than to be the one to reach out to contact her.  That would be playing her game and it's the last thing that Joan wants to do.

By the time that Joan's showered and dressed once more, all thoughts of Moriarty are completely pushed from her mind.  Marcus has arrived, a grim loom on his face.  He watches as Sherlock hands Joan a banana and a travel mug of tea with a raised eyebrow.  "Just got back from a run?"

Joan flashes him a small smile, "Was it that obvious?" she asks.

He shakes his head, "Nah, I just know your habits when you're not on a case."  He taps the side of his nose and Joan grins at him.  "Are you ready?" he adds.  He rises on his tiptoes to peer around the door as Sherlock gathers his things, rummaging through a drawer muttering about his camera lens.  Joan has a second one in her purse and calls to him that they really should be going.

The trip across the river and uptown is mostly quiet.  Marcus doesn't really know much other than that they've been called in because of their previous involvement with the investigation of Marie Montclair's father.  Joan has a sick feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach, one that she can already see blossoming into a full-bloomed terrible monster of doubt and worry.

And when Joan sees the partially covered body of Marie Montclair, a bullet hole clearly evident between her eyes, she covers her mouth and looks away.

Who would kill Marie Montclair?  What was the purpose of killing her?

 


	2. all my stumbling phrases (don't deserve such treatment)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING: There is a very loose discussion of pedophilia in this chapter. As in, there is a pedophile who is a character, whose pedophilia is discussed. If this is troubling to you, I recommend not reading, message me and I'll send you a draft that has those bits cut out.

The call comes late that night, from Westin's usual contact at the morgue.  They have Marie Montclair's body and the medical examiner has completed his autopsy.  Jamie takes the call herself, slipping into that same American voice that she's caught herself using with increasing regularity as of late. Jamie speaks to the technician for a few moments, before promising his usual rate and method of payment and hangs up the phone.

"I've got to say," Mr. Collins says, looking up from his newspaper, "it's strange to hear you speaking like an American."  He tilts his head to one side, and Jamie sets her phone down on the table beside her mess of paints and brushes.

"It does sound a bit off, doesn't it?" Jamie shakes her head.  It had been enough to fool the great Sherlock Holmes, after all.  Jamie's always been rather proud of that, especially since spending more time in New York has helped her to identify some of the inflection issues of her generic, everyman American accent.  "It's no wonder Joan Watson saw right through it," she can't help herself and her lips crack into a rueful smile.  Just thinking of that day is usually enough to send her into a mood that she can't shake for days.  Collins had been there when that meeting had gone so horribly wrong, after all, he'd driven the car and had sat there in stony silence as Jamie had found herself in a rare moment of panic, wondering just who Joan Watson was. "But no matter, that ship has sailed, anyway."

"Quite," Mr. Collins says with a sniff, and Jamie's inclined to agree with him as he goes back to his newspaper.  It is almost an understatement, and one of her few failures. Certainly it is the one she feels the most acutely.

Jamie turns her attention back to the corkboard where they've pinned up the basics of this job, right down to the vile little man that she's picked to take the fall for her.  His hair is mousey, and the photograph is dominated by his large nose and pointed chin. Martin Haufman is his name, and Jamie's been aware of him for some time as a potential in at Tenimont's company.  It is not every day that you encounter a high-ranking employee at such an organization with a proclivity for taking truly abhorrent pictures of his son when his wife was out of town.  He is both a stroke of luck and a public service, Jamie thinks, and his time in prison will not be pleasant.

"Where is Mr. Westin, anyway?" she asks, tearing her eyes away from Haufman's picture to regard Collins as he raises a hand to scratch at his hair.  It's growing out now, and there's about half an inch of curly black hair above his skull where they used to be nothing but closely cropped curls.  Jamie thinks it makes him look too young, and that it will draw attention to him.

Collins folds up the newspaper and sets it aside.  He bridges his fingers together and looks up at her with a severe expression on his face. There is truth in every element of his posture, and when he speaks, Jamie knows that he knows no more than what he's saying.  "Dunno, mum.  He said he had to take care of something with his girlfriend earlier. I think his phone's off."

Scowling Jamie glances towards the window and the growing night.  Marie Montclair has been dead for a full day now and they're running out of time to mobilize and destroy any and all connection that the organization might have to her murder.  Jamie hates to admit that she needs Westin, especially after resolving to keep him at an arm's length.  There is too much at stake here and she wants to make sure that it's perfect.

She taps her finger against her chin, knowing that Collins, at least, is currently unattached and is not placing time with his waste of a girlfriend above their work.  She should have that girl killed in some discrete way, put the blame on one of her enemies and watch Westin go mad for revenge.  She closes her eyes and imagines what it will be like, to savor the knowledge and to steer him further and further away from her own guilt and towards assigning it to another.

It would be a service to Jamie, to the organization as a whole to have Westin's mind fully invested in the events that will transpire over the next few hours and days.  Already there is a courier is on his way to Mr. Haufman, carrying the encrypted data that they need embedded where the FDA is sure to find it in Tenimont's files.  Jamie plans to call him in a few minutes, but she wants Westin taken care of first.  He is, after all, running point on this for the most party.

Turning back to Collins, Jamie fixes him with her most business-like stare. "We need him, Mr. Collins. Marie Montclair's body is in the city morgue and they've looked her over.  I want to make sure that there is no possible way that this can be connected to us."

Collins regards her, brow narrowed in thought.  Eventually he straightens and pulls his phone from his pocket.  He stares down at it for a moment before looking up sharply. "How could there be, you shot the girl with Tenimont's gun."

It is perhaps the one oversight that she cannot account for in her murder of Marie Montclair.  The burglary of Tenimont's apartment was months ago now, back at almost the exact moment when Jamie had realized that she would need to go to war against the PKE Group in order to get them to back down.  She hates that there are loose ends, that it isn't tidy the way she likes it, but she's been having to act quickly as of late, and haste usually means that there are details that go forgotten and plans can go sideways in a hurry.

"A gun, I'm sure, he would have reported stolen almost as soon as we liberated it from his possession." Jamie gestures towards the wall where Montclair's murder is also carefully planned out.  She points up at the corkboard. "Granted, we did insure that his fingerprints were the only ones on it, I'm sure he'll get out of it."

Collins folds his arms over his chest, biceps bulging under his sport coat.  "Are you worried then?" he asks.  Jamie likes Collins, because unlike Westin, who will question her and doubt her in a way that seems to be full of the intent to undermine her authority at times, he merely asks for her opinion on things in such a way that she actually wants to answer him.

This is a time for discursion, she supposes, but she looks at him, brushing her hair from her eyes.  "That it will be connected to the organization?" She shrugs, all confident arrogance that she doesn't truly feel.  There are risks in this business, there are always risks.  The trick is to set someone else to take the fall, should all things go south.  Jamie does hate getting her hands dirty, even if she relishes the chance to practice her craft.  "I suppose that I should be, but evidence has a slippery way of going missing."  Or rather, it does when the correct palms are greased.

Collins frowns. "Even with Holmes involved?"  Jamie shakes her head.  If anything, it's Watson that Jamie's worried about.  Joan Watson has always been able to see through her like she's made of glass.  This is the sort of plot that stands balanced on a razor's edge as it is, and Joan Watson is the tipping point.

"Holmes will be too busy chasing shadows to see the bigger picture," Jamie says. She's about to go on, to explain that Holmes is the one who is being threatened by this, by someone who knows Jamie's organization intimately.  Her mobile rings, a blocked number. She picks it up and answers, listening to the grim-voiced man on the other end of the line giving her what is probably the worst news she could stand to hear.

Their contacts at the crime lab are going through the evidence in Marie Montclair's murder, and Holmes is asking questions that Jamie's contact can make little sense of, but Jamie understands implicitly.  They'd already been looking into this.  She bites her lip, visions of how badly this could go flashing violently through her eyes.  The photos had been taken though a scope, she'd had them analyzed just to be certain, and the idea terrifies her.

Someone is stalking them, is stalking her.  Someone knows her secrets.

Her hand is shaking when she hangs up the phone and she sets it on the table so as not to betray herself to Collins. Show no weakness, her mother had always said, and it's the one thing that she'd ever said to Jamie that was worth anything at all.  Mothers, after all, are the cruelest of them all.

She sucks in a breath of air, and then another. When she speaks, her voice is low and full of barely-concealed anger.  "Mr. Collins, I need you to go and find Mr. Westin, retrieve him and bring him back here."

His eyes grow wide at her tone and Jamie feels a smile pull at her lips.  Good, let him be scared.  She'll kill him too if she must.  "Is everything alright, mum?"

Jamie stares darkly out at the growing night.  "One can only hope, Mr. Collins, one can only hope."

He leaves quickly and quietly and Jamie turns back to the window and closes her eyes.  In the warm blackness she feels like she can breathe again, and she takes one deep breath and schools her expression perfectly neutral.  The courier would have arrived by now.  It is time, she decides, to set the plan in motion.  The rat will out itself in time - and when it does, she is going to relish their termination from her employment.

Martin Haufman answers the disposable phone she'd given him on the first ring, his voice breathless and frightened.  She's pretending to be American with him, practicing her accent.  She thinks it's gotten good enough that Jamie is certain that she could probably fool Sherlock a second time over, if she were so inclined.

"I hope you are prepared to do your job, Mr. Haufman." She says, once he's indicated that the package had indeed arrived. Her lips curl upwards into a smile, because this is the part she likes the best, the lording that she knows the deepest, darkest secrets of a person over them, knowing that they will do anything she says to ensure her silence.  Power, she knows, is corrupting, but it is the sweetest taste she knows. Before her, half-formed in blocked out colors and half-finished thoughts, her painting sits in silent judgment of her revelry.

Even Joan Watson, Jamie thinks, would approve of her doing this.  Martin Haufman is a vile little man with a terrible secret that can only be resolved by his removal from his family, from the mere presence of his son.  She leans against the window, watching the traffic below for signs of Collins returning with the absent Mr. Westin. Her mobile feels heavy in her hands, like a dead weight meant to sink her.  This plan is flawless, perfect, Jamie knows it will not fail, but the doubt always remains.  "I'd hate for your wife to find out about the photographs you have of your son."

The anguished wail that the man lets out is enough to make Jamie wish he was in front of her.  She usually prefers to do this sort of blackmail in person.  She longs to scoff at his distress with a disinterested stare, mind caught up in imagining a far more painful fate than being sent to jail for a white-collar crime. It is always the children that Jamie finds herself distracted by, the children are innocent, and yet she has no compunction killing them if need be. Their wailing can be insufferable and it is precisely for this reason that she tries to avoid kidnapping them at all costs..  This child, Martin Haufman's child, however, he needs saving in the worst way.  Jamie is perfectly content to let Mr. Collins play his avenging angel, too, provided Haufman doesn't follow the rules.

"I-It'll--" he splutters, stuttering in his distress. Jamie imagines his face purple or red, choked with the weight of his own sin. "It'll be done, please, please, don't show them to her. I beg you --"

Someday, Jamie knows, the criminals will learn that it is not a good idea to beg her to do anything.  Today is not that day, apparently.  She straightens and looks away from the judgmental eyes of Joan Watson, half-painted around an incomplete chin and neck though they are.  "A word of advice for the future, Mr. Haufman," She knows she sounds arrogant, giving wisdom to a man whose life she is about to ruin.  She doesn't care how she comes off, she is better than him, than any of them.  She doesn't care about the child either, but his father's indiscretion has made her life a lot easier.  "If you're going to do that to a little boy, perhaps consider the consequences of your actions."  Her smile, as she catches sight of herself in the studio's tiny bathroom mirror, is wide and gleeful, pronouncing this man's doom.  "I will be watching, always, one word of this to anyone and I will make sure that you experience a fate worse than death in prison, Mr. Haufman.  I have eyes everywhere, and I will know."

**all my stumbling phrases (don't deserve such treatment)**

Sherlock wakes Joan up two days after Marie Montclair's murder with a stack of files and a cup of strong coffee, made just the way she likes it.  It's after eight, which has to be something of a record for him.  Joan takes the coffee he presses into her hands gratefully after leaning over to get her glasses from the bedside table.  "What's in there?" she asks, pointing at the file.

"Detective Bell dropped it off this morning," Sherlock explains, perching on the side of the bed and making room for Joan to maneuver, albeit slowly with a full mug of coffee in her hands to sit next to him.  She wraps her fingers around the warm ceramic, half-listening as Sherlock continues to speak.  "Captain Gregson has relented and we've been given permission to look back into the murder of Phillipe Montclair as it pertains to his daughter's death.  The autopsy results came in late last night as well," he adds, digging out a second file from where he'd been sitting on it.  He passes it over to Joan, who sets he coffee mug down on the floor before taking it.

"It does not contain any new information regarding cause of death," Sherlock says as Joan reads the medical examiner’s opinion that Marie Montclair died of a single gunshot wound to the head.  "But he included the ballistics report - the gun that was used to commit the crime was reported stolen by a Marc Tenimont about two months ago.  He did, however, report the loss of a silencer, and one was not recovered at the crime scene."

"So you think the killer used the gun but brought their own silencer?"  Joan's brow furrows.  "Why do that?"  It seems illogical, not to mention an unnecessary risk.

Sherlock shrugs.  "Sentimentality, practicality?  Any number of reasons could apply, Watson.  What matters is that we have a viable lead."  He bounces to his feet, nearly upsetting Joan's coffee and spins on one toe in the doorway.  "Get dressed, I've already called for a cab."

"Where does Marc Tenimont work?"  Joan calls after him as he thumps his way down the stairs three at a time. Joan is waiting for him to fall and break an ankle, but the inevitable crash has yet to come.

"Jersey City!"

Joan sets aside the file and groans, there'll be no time for her to shower then and she hates going to Jersey City.  It takes forever and there's really no easy way to get there. She runs a tired hand though her hair and looks up at the cracks in the ceiling for a moment before throwing back the covers and putting her bare feet on her icy floor.  It was getting to be winter again, and with winter would come the cold memories anew.

Her therapist has told her many times that she needs to confront the whole slew of bad memories and associations that she's felt coming on like a pressing storm since the days started to grow cooler and the trees around the city started to catch fire in the colors of autumn.  Joan knows what she has to do, but she's avoiding doing it.  It isn't that she doesn't want to, it is more than she doesn't know where to start.

Ms. Hudson had asked her an honest question before this whole mess with Marie Montclair's murder had started. Would it matter, had Moriarty been any other woman?  She was the woman to Sherlock, and she would always have that connection to him. Joan knows she could never do that to him.  It would be cruel and would probably speak far more to her mental state than Joan was willing to admit, for climbing into bed with an avowed murderer was a sure way to get herself hurt worse than Moriarty had ever hurt Sherlock.

Joan closes her eyes and pushes away that little, needling feeling that pricks at the back of her mind and sends shooting pains down the fast-fading scar on her arm.  The needling pain serves as an ever-present reminder that while Moriarty might be _the woman_ for Sherlock, Joan is fairly certain that she is the one who plays that role for Moriarty.

"Watson!" Sherlock calls up the stairs and Joan's eyes snap open once more.  "Do you want me to pack you something to eat on the way over?"

The thought of food this early in the morning makes Joan's stomach turn sourly and she shouts back in the negative, collecting her phone and heading for the bathroom to at least scrub the sleep from her face and to put her contacts in before Sherlock rushes her out the door.

  
An hour and a half later they're staring up at the great hulking building that plays host to T-MIT Pharmaceuticals.  Joan shifts uncomfortably as Sherlock pays the cabbie and waves off his offer to stick around, meter off, for their return trip.  "We may be a while," he says.

Inside, Joan can see Marcus and Captain Gregson speaking in low voices to a woman in a windbreaker that reads, of all bizarre things, 'FDA' on the back of it.  It must be an inspection, she gathers, she cannot think of another reason why they'd be there.

Sherlock's got his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at her with curious eyes.  "Why do you think someone would go to all the trouble to point a finger at Marc Tenimont regarding Marie Montclair's murder?"  he asks, stepping forward to hold the door open for her.

Occam’s Razor comes to mind, and Joan shrugs. Until they know more, she's not going to make any wild assumptions.  Leave that to Sherlock.  "Maybe it was convenient," she suggests before drawing up to Marcus and Captain Gregson.

"Holmes, Watson," Captain Gregson says.  "This is Alice Steigler.  Alice, Sherlock Holmes and Joan Watson. They do consulting work with the department on occasion."  Joan leans forward to shake Alice's hand. "She's with the FDA, they're doing a routine inspection onsite today."  He smiles at the mousy-looking woman with glasses and long brown hair that falls mid-way down her back.  "I think we scared her inspectors when we showed up and asked to speak to Mr. Tenimont."

Alice Steigler smiles prettily at both of them, her eyes are green and there are dimples at the corners of her cheeks.  "You did, Captain," she says and her accent isn’t local. She sounds like she’s from Philly.  "It's not often that we interact with law enforcement unless something has gone horribly wrong."  She looks pensive for a moment, a worried look drifting across her face.  She indicates a doorway at the far end of the reception area.  "Actually, if it's not too much trouble, captain, could I have a word in private?"

"Um," Captain Gregson says, and glances at Marcus.  "Can you handle this interview?"

"I'll see if he'll consent to having it recorded," Marcus says, pulling a small digital recorder from his pocket.  "So you can hear it after."

"Smart," the captain replies, and follows Alice Steigler out of the room.

"I wonder what that was all about," Joan mutters, half to herself.

Marcus stares after the captain's retreating back.  "She does seem really agitated about something, but it can't be anything too serious, because the FDA's got procedures for stuff like that." He tugs his notebook from his pocket and flips it open.  "Did you get anything from that file?"

Sherlock shakes his head, "I must confess that I was not able to review it in the cab..."

"He got carsick," Joan supplies and Sherlock's ears turn a little red and he turns to stare at her.  She just smiles at him.  She, at least knows better than to try and do anything other than stare out the window in the back of New York taxicab. "I think we have a pretty good idea of what to ask Mr. Tenimont, though, don't you?"

Marcus nods his agreement.

The secretary behind the front desk and the obscenely large company logo that's raised in chrome and light on the wall behind her clears her throat loudly.  "Mr. Tenimont will see you now." She says, indicating the guy that's appeared beside the desk.  He's a total silver fox, tall with an impressive head of stark white hair.  His eyes are narrowed and he's fiddling with his obviously expensive watch.

He leads them, silently, back through a set of double doors and down a hallway to well-lit office.  "This is about my missing gun, isn't it?"  He says. He speaks with an accent that sounds vaguely French, but it's very slight, he's spent a long time speaking English then.  Or he was raised bilingual.  "Detective?"

"Marcus Bell," Marcus says, sliding his card across Marc Tenimont’s expensive, if mostly empty desk.  "This is Sherlock Holmes and Joan Watson," he adds, indicating Joan and Sherlock.  "They do consultant work for us sometimes and were involved with some previous cases that have... erm, some common ties," he settles on and Joan's grateful he didn't tip their hand completely.

"It's nice to meet you," Tenimont replies.  His eyes are narrowed and he's staring at both of them, Joan especially, with interest.  Joan fidgets, feeling instantly uncomfortable.  "I'm afraid I don't know how much help I can be, I reported that gun missing months ago and I hadn't heard anything so I just assumed that..."

"Do you know a girl named Marie Montclair?" Marcus leans forward, fingers bridged on the table and his expression intense.  Joan wonders why he's not just letting Tenimont talk.

 _Tenimont thinks he has a good poker face_ , Joan realizes.  His expression falters and something that could be sadness drifts into his eyes.  He looks down, fiddles with his watch again.  Joan’s eyes narrow.  He’s lying to their faces and expecting them not to notice.  "I don't," he says in a resigned sounding voice.  "Why do you ask?"

"She was the person who was shot with your missing gun," Marcus says, shaking his head sadly.

They speak to Tenimont for some time, but it's pretty obvious to Joan and Sherlock both that whatever he does know, he's not interested in sharing without a good reason to compel him to do so.

"He's a good liar," Sherlock says, glaring disgustedly at the outside of the building as they wait outside for Captain Gregson.  "Exceptional, really, but he obviously knows Marie Montclair, and probably who did this as well."

They both have a theory about that, Joan knows this.  Sherlock's keeping his thoughts to himself, probably because Marcus is eyeing them with interest and as much as Joan wants to tell him that keeping secrets from Marcus is a bad idea.  Especially after the last time when Marcus had had to cover for them and it had almost ended in utter disaster.

Joan swallows her doubts about the matter, she’ll voice them later, away from this audience.  "She wouldn't be so brazen," she says, touching Sherlock's arm.  "It's not really her style."

"She has theatrically murdered one person this year already," Sherlock mutters, crossing his arms over his chest and scowling, "But I see your point."  He shifts from foot to foot, "What on earth is taking Gregson so long?"

"No idea," Joan says.  It's a nice day, but she's starting to get hungry and the cool breeze that's whipping up the street is enough to make her wish for a warmer coat despite the pleasantness of the temperature.  She bites back anything else she wants to say, because Gregson appears with Alice Steigler a few minutes later, a concerned expression on his face.

"We need to get DCS on the phone," he says, his expression grave.  Alice Steigler looks as though she's seen a ghost, or at least something really horrible.  "Right now." he adds when Marcus doesn’t move for his phone immediately.

"What's up?" Marcus asks, tugging his phone out of his pocket and scrolling through his contacts.

"Routine scan that Alice's techs run picked up on some irregularities," Gregson grunts, taking the phone when Marcus passes it over to him.  He looks as though he's been through a war and Joan suddenly has a sick feeling she knows exactly what they'd found on that scan.  Her stomach turns and she looks, horrified, over at Sherlock.  He looks ashen, and she knows that he's followed the string of what is not being said as well.

"Yeah, this is Tommy Gregson - Brooklyn 11th.  I need you to send a representative to our precinct.  We're going to be bringing in a kid."  Gregson pauses, listening.  "The father's name is Marty Haufman.  He works at T-MIT Pharm in Jersey City.  Lives in Red Hook."  He puffs out his cheeks. "Look, I don't know what PS the kid goes to, or if he's somewhere private.  I do know that I saw some horrifying pictures and I want to have one of your people there when I interview the kid."

Joan's fingers fly up to cover her mouth and she feels sick to her stomach.  Alice Steigler has a similar look on her face and she's got her arms warped around herself.  Captain Gregson hangs up the phone and indicates the waiting car.  "We'd better go," he says. "Thank you for telling me about this, Alice.  Don't mention anything to Mr. Haufman if you can help it right now."

She nods and turns to head back inside, leaving the four of them standing in a rough circle of worried faces.  Joan closes her eyes and lets herself entertain the fantasy, just for a moment, that this isn't going to end in an arrest and a deeply traumatized child.  "This doesn't have anything to do with our case."

"I wouldn't it put it past someone who obviously thinks themselves a good enough liar ot lie to my face to throw up a smoke screen like that," Marcus grouses.  He tosses the keys to Gregson and they all move towards the car.  "I want permission to stay on the Montclair case," he adds.

"You should," Gregson agrees.  "I see no reason to split the man power, we're not SVU, after all. I'm sure that they'll probably want to take this case once they catch wind of it.  And I'm okay with that, provided that we don't need Marty Haufman for anything else."

Sherlock leans forward, hands on his knees.  "Do you think that there might be more to him?" he asks.

"I'm not sure," Captain Gregson answers.  "Alice mentioned that there were some other irregularities in the report but that those pictures were the big one.  She had no idea why they were stored on a shared server for drug research anyway."

"That is a little weird," Joan agrees.  It's the sort of thing that she'd expect if there was more going on here, and things aren't adding up.  Her phone is in her purse and, not for the first time, Joan is contemplating using it because there's at least one person who is probably wandering around this city that has more answers than they do right now.  Nothing makes sense, and it seems as though Marie Montclair's death was simply a cause to steer them straight towards Marc Tenimont and his company.

She leans forward, setting her purse between her feet on the floor, and sits back to stare out the window.  She can't do it, no matter how much she wants to.

-

The sun is setting when Collins trudges up the stairs with a carton of soup from a restaurant Jamie tends to favor when she's in the city clutched inside a paper bag.  She's forgotten to eat today, her mind preoccupied with keeping track of the puzzle pieces as they slowly fit themselves into a picture of the PKE Group's humiliation and downfall.  Martin Haufman had played right into their hands, getting the attention of not only the FDA, but Sherlock and Watson as well.  It had been a stroke of good fortune that she'd not anticipated, that they'd just happen to be there when the FDA’s head auditor made the initial discovery.  She'd assume the case would go straight through to Special Victims and they'd only hear about it well after the fact.

She's spent the day telling herself that ensuring that Martin Haufman was caught, despite her utter apathy towards the situation, was not a sign of weakness.  Collins, at least, seems to approve of it.  He's always had an unfortunate weakness for children; Jamie's made a point of having him kill a few to get it out of his system.  So far, her efforts have been unsuccessful, but it doesn't mean that she'll stop trying.

"Mr. Collins," Jamie says as she accepts the spoon he's gotten from the kitchen and the carton of soup and with a piece of freshly baked wheat bread balanced precariously on top of it.  Her stomach makes a hungry noise, and she hopes it's not loud enough for Collins to hear.  He is used to her eating habits by now, but Jamie sets the cup aside and rests one hand on her desk, her expression dark and almost worried.

Westin still hasn't been found, and Jamie's mind has already run through the reasonable explanations to settle on the ones that she can't stomach, the ones that spell doom in more ways than one.

"You have failed to produce Mr. Westin twice now."  She'd sent him out to fetch Westin a little after five and he'd come back with dinner and a manila folder tucked under his arm.

"You should eat," he says, pointing to the soup.  He looks uncomfortable even suggesting that she do anything, but Jamie knows that he's heard her stomach and she can't exactly deny that she is hungry.  She picks up the spoon and he continues to speak as she rips the bag open and sets the bread aside.  The soup is made with orzo, lemon and parsley and it's absolutely divine.  "I can't find him, mum, him or his girlfriend.  They straight up vanished." He shrugs and then glances down at the envelope that he's still holding as if he'd forgotten he still had it in hand. "This was shoved under the door," he added, holding it out to her.

"What is it?" Jamie asks, taking the envelope and swallowing quickly.  She knows what this is, and it drives home the grim reality of this situation in a way that she'd never anticipated.  Betrayal tastes so sweet, she supposes.

She rips open the envelope and pulls out a set of eight by tens - this time printed on matte paper.  Their camera man and his rifle, it seems, is on the move.  This time he's included a timestamp.  Jamie stares at the time and tires to remember if Collins was with her. She thinks he was, but she hadn't made a point of looking at a clock.  Her blood is pounding in her ears, trying to play this off as not a threat.

She tears a corner of her piece of bread off and eats it, chews seventeen times and swallows, her face a perfect mask.  "Mr. Collins, what were you up to this morning at ..." she raises her gaze to meet his dark eyes evenly, "half ten?"

Collins rocks back on the heels of his very expensive shoes, his expression pensive.  "Getting your dry cleaning," he says at length.  He pulls out his wallet and starts to rifle through it. "Got the receipt here somewhere..." He produces it and passes it over to her, "And then we were running checks on what you'd done to Montclair's computer systems for most of the afternoon.  Why?"

Jamie drops the stack of photos over the desk space and picks up her soup cup.  Collins leans forward to get a better look, his eyes narrowing as he examines a particularly alarming one of Sherlock.  "It seems they already found one of our little presents, if Mr. Haufman's arrest yesterday evening is anything to go by."  She chews moodily on a piece of lemon rind. "Someone is following Holmes and Watson.  Someone with a high caliber rifle and a far more intimate knowledge of this operation than I would ever allow to roam free."

"Westin?" he guesses, and at her slow nod he lets out a quiet curse.

"I do not see any other potential suspects who have this level of knowledge," He looks up at her then, his eyes full of a grim determination that comes from being told to murder one of his best friends in cold blood.  He'll do it too, that's one thing that Collins has always been good for, his ability to kill, even when he does not want to.  He's good at it, creative. He'll see it done.  Jamie reaches out, touches his shoulder.  It's a kind gesture, and one she wouldn’t make for many people, but this one hurts more so than it would usually.  She’d thought she could trust Westin, and he'd betrayed her. "I need you to find him, Mr. Collins.  Find him and end him."

He nods, "And you?"

Jamie sticks her spoon in her mouth, buying herself time to work out her response.  She doesn't want to say that she thinks she might want to go see Joan Watson and tell her to be careful. She's not entirely sure that that's a good idea.  "I think I may need to --" she says, swallowing.  She's about to say more, when the laptop that's shoved off on one corner of the desk whirrs to life and their monitoring program delivers them an alert.  "Oh, look Mr. Collins, they're accessing my planted files."

He leans forward, pulling one of the photos from the keyboard and clicking the buttons to enlarge the screen captures that they've been watching all day with interesting.  Jamie eats another bite of soup, "Call our reporter friend at the _Post_ , keep it discrete, tell them that T-MIT Pharm is about to get implicated in flooding the market with a subpar product.  I want a frenzy, I want them humiliated before I kill them."

-

It is late in the evening, two days after Marie Montclair's murder.  Joan and Sherlock have been going over what precious little evidence there is in the case for the better part of the afternoon and evening now, only taking a break to hastily scarf down some quesadillas that Joan had put together using leftovers from the previous evening.  Now they were back in the library, staring up at the pictures of Marie Montclair and the tentative connection that they'd managed to find between her and Marc Tenimont and his company.

There simply wasn't anything to go on.  Even the gun, which had seemed like such an intriguing piece of evidence, was turning out to be a dead end.  The silencer's made it so that the striation marks on the bullet that they'd dug out of Marie Montclair's forehead had lead nowhere.

They were talking in circles, digging through the evidence and statements that had been collected when Marie Montclair's father had been shot at the end of the Camille Vincent affair.  Joan had her suspicions about who was behind that assassination, but she could not prove it, even though she was fairly certain, if she were to ask, that she'd get an honest answer.

Phillipe Montclair had been killed with a different caliber gun, a .38 instead of a .22, Sherlock kept harping on that fact.  "It doesn't make any sense for Tenimont to own such a small caliber weapon, Watson," he kept saying.  Marcus had agreed that a guy Tenimont’s size could go to any gun show or sporting goods store and get recommended a larger caliber weapon.  So even if he faked ignorance of the situation completely, it didn't explain why he owned such a gun.  There were a million questions, and at this point, Joan was tempted to start to operate under the assumption that the gun was just a red herring, meant to point them towards Tenimont while the real murder ran free.

It was far more her style to do something like that, after all, and the thought made Joan sick to her stomach.  What the hell had Marie Montclair done to anyone? She seemed so innocent compared to her father, who had posthumously been implicated in that human trafficking and smuggling ring that they'd helped to break up as they'd found themselves in Camille Vincent's crosshairs.

She wanted to lie to herself, to say that there was a sense of justice in Moriarty, and that sense of justice would have her protecting the innocent.  She knew it wasn't true, there was nothing good about Moriarty, just shades and shades of grey so dark they were blacker than night.

And yet, Joan finds herself curled up around a book that documents some of the more recent major pharmaceutical scandals wondering if she were to ask Moriarty how the rules of the game would change.  So far it has been a give and take: Moriarty wants something from Joan, and Joan refuses to acquiesce to her needling, her prying, her _kissing._

The kissing is really something else entirely.  She has no idea what to make of that. It seems like it should be easy, to know that it's just another smokescreen, thrown up to distract Joan from the rotten core of the woman whose interest she's peaked, but Joan has to know for sure before she passes judgment.  Anything less seems like the poor spirit of competition.

(And a part of her, the part of her that she hates beyond all measure for its lack of self-control and love of self-indulgence, wants to kiss Moriarty again.  If only to prove, once and for all, that it was a mistake to let it happen in the first place.)

Sherlock has wandered over to the computer and is making oddly content noises as he types away.  He's probably arguing with someone, Joan knows, and she ignores him and hopes that this book will prove more insightful than whatever fifteen-year-old he's decided to pick a bone with today.

"Watson, look at this." His voice is sharp, full of infection and worry that has Joan shoving her bookmark into her book and getting to her feet.  The floor is starting to grow cold, and Joan's feet feel wet and sticky on the floorboards as she pads over to stand behind Sherlock.

He's clicking through something that he shouldn't have access too, and Joan remembers how easily Moriarty was able to hack into Sonny Park's personal and very much offshore banking, information.  She bites back an accusation and leans over his shoulder, reading with narrowed eyes.  "These are bank statements, how did you get into this?"

Looking up at Joan guiltily, Sherlock turns away. His eyes are a little red from too much caffeine and staying awake pretty much all of last night.  She'd come down at eight for her run this morning to find him curled up on the couch, the timestamp on his last text to Marcus reading six-thirty.  She'd let him sleep, but he'd woken up by the time she had gotten back.  "When one barters a little online humiliation, there is very little that the anonymous hackers of the Internet will not provide," he gives a little shake, and adds, just casually enough that Joan's eyes narrow and her breath catches in her throat. "Best not ask what I have to do."

"Will it get you arrested?" she asks, because that is honestly the most important thing.

"Only in a few countries.  Not this one." Joan glares at him but he's already turned his attention back to the screen, tapping it with the back of the pen he's been chewing on.  There are numbers on the screen, accounts that Joan knows they shouldn't be able to trace, but Sherlock's gone and done it, proving once more than if it's questionable in its legality, he's more than willing to dabble in it if it gets him the answers he needs and wants. "But look, those corporations are all dummies, but their names trace back to known groups with ties to the Triads and the Irish Mafia.  This all but proves that T-MIT and therefore Tenimont are probably connected, in some way, to the PKE Group."

Ties to the PKE Group could only mean one thing, and Joan thinks again to her phone, plugged in and charging after it'd died on her run earlier.  She wants to ask, because there's nothing wrong with asking, and insight is always appreciated in this line of work.  She knows she shouldn't even be entertaining the idea of it.  Jamie Moriarty is not the sort of person who can be called in casually to consult on their cases.  Not unless something far greater than a simple curiosity at stake.

Still, Joan voices the thought that she's sure Sherlock's had as well.  "Marie Montclair's father was as well.  He figured out... Moriarty's erm..." she falters, meeting Sherlock’s sad eyes, "preoccupation with us."  Joan swallows, and turns her attention back to the numbers. "That'd mean that this is probably the legitimate arm of their company," she adds, and the implications are staggering.

Most of the criminal enterprises that they've dealt with (and Joan hates that Moriarty's organization is chief among them) are almost exclusively illegitimate.  They knew how to investigate those sorts of organizations, to look for skeletons in closets, things like that.  This is an entirely different animal, and not the sort of thing that Joan really has any experience in.  She bites her lip and stares at the computer screen.

If Tenimont was truly that corrupt, would the FDA investigating - or auditing (she'd never really gotten a good handle on what exactly Alice Steigler's group was doing. She assumed some sort of quality audit, though, going off of her reading.) - be enough to bring them down internally?

Sherlock's expression had turned grim, and Joan stares at him, trying to figure out what is bothering him so much about this.  He doesn't usually grow so quiet and reflective during investigations unless he is truly struggling at putting the evidence together.  This is supposedly a huge break in the case, so why is he so worried-looking?

"I'd be willing to hypothesize that it's also where they produce the drugs that they sell on the street."  He sighs, sitting back in his chair.  "Remember the initial reason we started to look into Sonny Park?"

_The drug deal that had gone south..._

Joan swallows.

"How could they make drugs in a legitimate facility like that without getting caught?" she asks.  She has no idea how something could be possible.  Nothing that she's ever experienced would suggest that something like that would be possible.

Sherlock makes a humming sound at the back of his throat, clicking into another window.  "Perhaps it's a good thing that Mr. Haufman is a fool; his files have the FDA looking more closely at T-MIT's reporting.  If there's something there, they'll find it." He glances up at Joan. "I hope so anyway."

It seems like a dismissal, and Joan knows that he must have some theories about the why of this.  The fact that he's keeping them to himself brings her harshly back to her conversation with him from before they started this investigation.  They're at odds on how to over the Moriarty situation, she knows that, and they're both far too invested in it.

He must see the connection, the same as Joan does.  It makes her nervous even to think about it.  Up to this point, they've come across Moriarty's victims in the loosest sense of the word, save Camille Vincent (And Joan's grateful that she's dead).  They've never really had to come to terms with the fact that Moriarty kills and oftentimes kills indiscriminately to suit her purposes.  Suiting her purposes is one thing, too.

Joan doesn’t understand how any of this has anything to do with Marie Montclair.  Moriarty doesn't leave loose ends, they both know that.  She'd arranged to have Sherlock killed before she'd gotten cold feet and had reneged on her decision to do so. While that had a huge insight into Moriarty's character, it didn't explain why she'd be so foolish, so rash.

_Rash..._

Everything about the Camille Vincent investigation had been rash.  It hadn't been thought out.  There'd been no time.  She'd spent half of her time sitting in this very room, talking the situation over with Joan and Sherlock.  Was it a miscalculation?

Joan swallows, resolving, in that moment, to ask.  That is the only choice they have, because otherwise they're going to get stuck in this lop of seeing only what they're wanted to see.  Especially if Moriarty is involved at all, and Joan's almost positive she is.

Changing the rules of the game, she'd said.  She assumes that this constitutes changing them.  She won't let Moriarty dictate their interactions or this investigation.

"It doesn't explain why Marie Montclair was murdered though.  With Tenimont’s gun.  To me that says that someone wanted us investigating him."  She bites back all that she wants to say to Sherlock.  Let them keep their own council for now.  They were sure to come back together soon enough.

Sherlock pushes himself back in his chair, hands on his thoughts and pensive.  "Well, if he's tied to the PKE Group, maybe that's the reason?" he suggests in a mild tone.

Joan runs a tired hand through her hair.  He's got a point. They probably are thinking too hard about this.  "Perhaps we're over thinking this, you're right." she says.

He nods, and gets slowly to his feet.  "Will you be alright for a few minutes? I need to go up and make some adjustments on the hives.  As it starts to get cold, they require more tending."

"Sure," she says, watching him retreat towards the stairs.

-

The call, when it comes, is not entirely unexpected. It does interrupt her progress, a thousand strokes of contemplation.  She twists her wrist over, brush still in hand, and scribbles '376' in pale yellow paint on her mostly clean and dry wrist.  She blows on the numbers for a second, before she bends to pick up her mobile.  There's a sense of nervousness about her as she stares down at the number, the name (the innocently snapped picture).  Jamie closes her eyes, counts to five, and flicks her thumb to answer the call.

"Joan," she says warmly, and it is genuine pleasure, rather than a put on tone that creeps into her voice.  Jamie does love her game, after all, and Joan Watson might play it better than anyone she's ever met. "I never expected you to actually call."

"I never expected to have reason to," Joan Watson replies, and her tone is all tense and harsh - everything it should not be.  Jamie hopes that she's not still troubled by Sonny Park's actions and wishes, not for the first time, that she'd killed him.  Watson hasn't been bothered by Camille Vincent's death, as far as Jamie, or any of her people can determine, but Park still lingers.  Jamie will play the avenging angel, if that is what is required.  She'll kill a thousand men if it means understanding the enigma of Joan Watson's mind.

Strange that she will call and offer such an insight, however.  That is not Watson's usual style of deny, deny, deny.  Jamie's mind presses on, and silence fills the phone line.

it is an odd, hollow sort of feeling, to listen to the emptiness and know, somewhere in this great city, there is another who is hearing that same void.  Conversations over mobiles in the middle of the night, it'd be almost romantic, if Jamie believed in that sort of thing.  And anything is better than a silence with no end.

She cannot attempt to read Watson's face over the phone, and words are becoming truly elusive things between them, it seems.

"Could I see you?"

 _Well, well, Joan Watson_ , Jamie feels a smile blossom at her lips.  "Tonight?" she asks in response, because she'd need to change, to look the part for Watson.  A part of her wants to say no, to play coy and see if Watson will come and find her.  Jamie knows that sometimes speed facilitates necessity and she does want to see Watson.

And Watson is silent for a long time before making an affirmative noise.  "If you can," she adds, a weak-sounding apology trailing through the thread of the conversation.  There's really no need for that, Jamie would fly around the world to see her, should she only ask.

"I can," Jamie replies, casting about for all that she needs to do.  Cleaning the paint off of her hands will be the first step.  And probably off of the side of her face and the mobile screen as well.  She closes her eyes, thinking of all the places they've been together, and yet a place with low visibility to make Watson's apparent stalker leave them alone.  She recalls a thread of conversation, a compliment on her hair, cut as it was after a job nearly-botched and three stitches in her calf.  "Do you know that park, where we met this summer?"

"Yes."

"Good, find our spot in an hour.  I'll be waiting."  She hangs up before she can say more, before she can hint that she's looking forward to this.  She misses Watson; she likes their games and all that goes unsaid between them.

She misses the little rush of power that shoots down her spine with Watson's breath on her lips, the feel of her hair all tangled up in her fingers and all that Jamie cannot understand about her easy comprehension of the game that they play.  She wants it, and yet she wants to understand how it is that Watson could dismantle her with a look, and how Jamie wants to do a lot more than take her apart and see how she works.  Joan Watson holds the key to her undoing, and Jamie must understand how and why.

Watson is going to ask about Marie Montclair, and Jamie is not sure she has a reason that will satisfy Joan Watson.  She swallows down the nagging sensation of doubt and gathers her brushes.  She's been lucky, there's no paint on her mobile, such things are something akin to a miracle - oils get everywhere.  She goes to wash her brushes, catching sight of herself in the dusty mirror that leans over the dump sink in the corner of her studio space.  She looks a mess.

Jamie doesn't scrub off the reminder of her stroke count, but cleans her brushes dutifully.  She doesn't think that she'll be able to finish the meditation tonight anyway.  Not the way that these nights usually seem to go.

The night is cool, but not unbearably so, and Jamie dresses to blend in, rather than to impress Joan Watson.  She knows that she should put on the mask that she's so accustomed to wearing around Watson, but Watson has proven rather adept at ripping it away to see what is underneath. It's easier to tug on a favorite jumper and discard her smock over her the back of her stool.  It is a calculated risk, to show up looking comfortable in an uncomfortable situation where Jamie is sure Watson will get an answer out of her that she does not want to give.

If Watson hasn't already figured it out, she is sure to. Jamie is not ashamed of what she's done or why she's done it.  She's told Watson before that she would move heaven and earth to keep her safe.

Collins is out, presumably looking for Westin and the confirmation of all his lies, and Jamie doesn't bother to leave him a note.  He's more than capable of inferring that her absence is of her own design.  Still, Jamie takes the gun that's sitting beside her laptop and her careful monitoring of the investigation into Tenimont's company and tucks it into her purse.  She doesn't think she'll need it, but she wants to make sure that should she have to, she can act.

Twenty minutes later finds Jamie is sitting in the dark, her eyes trained on the pathway that cuts through this shady set of tables and chairs.  She's brushed fallen leaves from the other chair as well, and is breathing evenly when Joan Watson's solitary form, head bowed against the breeze off the river, appears in the distance.

It's dark enough that Jamie's squinting a little in the dark, and when Watson cuts through the clearing and draws level with the table that Jamie's set to be the barrier between them, her expression is masked by long, black shadows.

"Hello Joan," Jamie says, and there's that warmth again, creeping into her voice.  She is genuinely pleased to see Watson, despite all of her apprehension and confusion surrounding this woman and all that Jamie knows her to be.

Watson looks nervous, her fingers curling around the back of the chair before she hurriedly sits down.  In the light of the streetlamp up the walking path, Jamie can see that her eyes are alert, darting around the clearing. She's looking, no doubt, for a bodyguard.  Jamie feels a little laugh bubble out from her lips, "Relax, Watson, I came alone," she says, leaning forward, elbows on the table that feels like an mile between them.  "Mr. Collins is on an errand, anyway."

"I'm sure," Watson says in a doubtful tone.  Jamie doesn't let her expression falter, but her eyes narrow.

"Do you truly not trust me?"  she asks, trying to inject hurt into her inflection.  It's put-on and sounds fake, but Watson knows better than to trust her with anything less than her life.

"Not even a little," Watson says in return, but she's stopped looking around so nervously.  Perhaps she's realized that Jamie, at least right now, has no cause to lie to her.

They stare at each other across the table and Jamie can see Watson's jaw working.  She's swallowing back fear, Jamie knows, and she wants to reach out and touch her to reassure her that no harm will come to her while Jamie still draws breath.  She'd made a promise to Sherlock, and Jamie doesn't break her word.

"Marie Montclair is dead," Watson begins, meeting Jamie's gaze evenly.  Her eyes are flinty in this dim light, and the breeze off of the river is enough to make the hair on the back of Jamie's neck stand up on end.  It cuts through her sweater like it's not there at all.

"Forgive me if I do not mourn the death of the child of my enemy," Jamie says in a carefully disinterested tone.  She knows that Watson is watching her, attempting to gauge her reaction or lack thereof. She knows as well as Watson does that the murder an NYU student is the juicy sort of news that ends up splashed all over the covers of the _Post_.  It isn't exactly new information.  "Or are you attempting to determine if I was involved?"

Watson looks down at her hands, clenched around her purse straps.  "I don't think you'd tell me if you were," she says and her glare is enough to cut steel.  Jamie regards her impassively.  She has no patience for such exercises, it isn't the real reason that Watson's asked her here and they both know it. "Did you?"

"Did I _what_?" Jamie asks, drawing it out and knowing that annoyance is now written plainly across Watson's face.  Watson really does make it too easy, despite giving as good as she gets under better circumstances.

"Murder Marie Montclair."

"Would it be easier for you if I had?"  Jamie asks, leaning back in her chair and folding her hands in her lap.  Easier for Joan to do what, she does not wish to say.  To hate her, to see her for who she really is; Watson's never run from the name Moriarty, Jamie likes that about her.  "Had I murdered the Montclair girl, it would have been for a good reason," Jamie adds, almost off-handedly.  It's not an admission, but it's almost as good as one.

She watches Joan Watson's face for signs of weakness.  There aren't any.  She regards Jamie impassively, her jaw twitching a little.  She's biting back words, molars sinking into the inside of her cheek again and again.  That's curious, Jamie knows, and she desperately wants to know what Watson is thinking but not saying.  "And what reason could possibly justify a murder?"

And Jamie looks away, her lips drawing into a thin line.  "Preventing yours," she says and it's like an admission of all of her sins, looking to Joan Watson for absolution.

Watson reaches across the table with a shaky hand, her hand open and Jamie can see the hesitation in every move she makes. This has cost her, trapped her in a lie that she's not entirely comfortable with.  She takes the hand that's offered to her like a lifeline, desperate to pull her towards salvation.

Joan Watson's hand is warm, and her eyes are wide and worried, but she does not speak at all.  And when Jamie pulls her to her unsteady feet and kisses her like a coward, stiff and awkward, Watson does not pull away.


	3. screaming out a language (I never knew)

A breath of air drifts across the small wooded area, cutting through Jamie's jumper and making her shiver despite her best efforts not to show any reaction at all to the cold.  Her lips feel swollen, bruised even.  This had not been her intention, coming here, but it is a welcome distraction.

She steps back from Watson, watching her with narrowed, curious eyes.  She's fidgeting with the buttons on her jacket, not meeting Jamie's gaze. There's a flush across her cheeks, making them look dark in the dim light of the street lamp that scarcely is managing to illuminate this spot - their spot – if Jamie was one for such sentimentality, which is certainly is not.  "Does Sherlock know where you are?" It's a gamble, an opening that she has to take.  She is not certain if Watson would lie to Sherlock, or if she'd be honest with him about how their meetings as of late have gone. It is an odd feeling for Jamie, to stare a choice in the face and not know which way the coin will fall before it is even flipped.

Watson says nothing, her expression stony and stoic, her eyes alight in the darkness.  Jamie waits, one beat, two beat, three.  The silence stretches out between them, a masking cloak of all that cannot be said.  Watson is right, she'd killed Marie Montclair, but Jamie's reasons are her own and loose ends are entirely too bothersome to deal with if left to fester.

"I only ask because it's getting cold and I thought a change of venue might be nice."  Watson had the good sense to put on a jacket before venturing out, Jamie hadn’t thought that they'd linger long enough to need to discuss going inside.  She gestures towards the street, the light.  "I've a place near here."

"Of course you do," Watson says it with a rueful shake of her head, and Jamie's puzzled for a brief moment before she realizes how absolutely impractical it must seem to Watson, to be a criminal on the run in one of the biggest cities in the world.  Jamie's good at not being noticed, but Watson doesn't know that, all that Watson has ever seen of her is her showmanship and her want to impress those she can't quite bring herself not to care about.  Perhaps it is time Watson learned just how good Jamie is at going unnoticed.

She sighs, regarding Jamie, one hand clutching the purse strap that she's slung over her shoulder.  There is a resignation about her, or at least an interest that Jamie wants to pick apart.  It would be easier just to ask, but Jamie's never been one for doing things the easy way. "And no, he doesn't know where I am."

 _Now Joan Watson_ , Jamie thinks, taking half a step forward.  _That is interesting._   Why would she lie to Sherlock?  Or even simply omit the truth? Surely she did not lie about what had happened between them before.  There were statements to the police that she'd read, and they included every detail of the conversations they'd shared.

Every detail, save one.

There, hidden in deep the case file of the investigation into the sex trafficking ring that Jamie's execution of Camille Vincent, was a handwritten statement from Watson recalling the events in that empty, dilapidated house.  Jamie had had to procure the original case file from her man in the NYPD records department in order to read it – no copy of it was ever digitized.  Watson had recounted everything that had happened in that empty house, right up until the moment that Jamie had walked in.  After that, she'd left out details.  Camille Vincent was shot by a lone assailant who fled the scene before Joan or Sherlock could get a good look at him or her.

Jamie had wondered, sitting in an idling car outside of the records department as she read, if Watson had done such a thing on purpose, or if she was protecting the game that they were set to play.  To this day, Jamie doesn't know, and the words to ask feel unwise as she twists them over in her mind.

Watson meets Jamie's gaze evenly, before her eyes slide to the path and the pool of yellow light cast by the streetlamp.  "How far is your place?" she asks.

Remembering herself, and the situation at hand, Jamie is pulled from her reverie.  "Three blocks," she says, and begins to walk in the direction of home.  She can almost feel Watson debate whether or not to come with her, the hesitation and worry that pulls at her lips as Jamie glances over her shoulder fades and she takes two quick steps to fall into step beside Watson.  Jamie doesn’t look at her, her mind already caught up in surveying the street.  The cars are all cold, dark, no one is around at this time of night in this neighborhood.

It is only when they've crossed the first street and are walking in stony silent step together that Jamie adds, her face and voice the picture of nonchalance, "You didn't ask to see me to discuss Marie Montclair, did you?"

For the span of another block, Watson says nothing at all, her hands in her pockets and her expression irritatingly unreadable.  Jamie wants to pull open that expression, to figure out why she can see nothing but blankness within it, but the only ways she knows how to get such answers are not ways that she'd ever consider using on Joan Watson.

They're turning north, footsteps echoing in the quiet of this neighborhood street at such a late hour, when Watson finally speaks.  The words seem to come with such effort that Jamie catches herself wondering what doing this has cost Joan Watson.  She does not seem like the type to lower herself to asking such questions when the answers are obtained easily enough.  "I wanted to know if Tenimont is connected to the PKE Group."

 _Of all the questions..._   Jamie just barely resists pinching the bridge of her nose and scowling at Watson.  She would have thought it obvious, especially to a woman of Watson's apparent intelligence. She reaches into her purse for her keys, fingers closing around the grip of her gun before she unearths them.

She stands there for a moment, her keys in hand, weighing the possible outcomes of this.  She wants to draw Watson inside, especially since Sherlock is unaware of where she is, he’ll _infer_ and Jamie wants that. She wants to draw her inside and keep her there to explore whatever it is that exists between them.  She knows it's foolish, a risk that Watson will surely use to her advantage - as is their game - after all. "Of course he is, Watson," she says, a small smile playing at her lips as she unlocks the door and ushers Watson inside.

They're in the lift before Watson speaks again, and Jamie's watching her observe her surroundings.  Jamie must admit that the loft style of this building is a bit more derelict than she likes usually, but there's no doorman and no one asks questions when she keeps odd hours.  It's safer than her usual New York safe house, at any rate.  They'd found that after the Sonny Park case and she's had to burn it for the time being. 

"You're going to kill him, aren't you?"  It isn't phrased like a question.

Jamie regards her openly, her expression carefully neutral.  Such a declaration probably deserves more fanfare than she's offering, but she's maybe a coward and maybe unsure of what such a statement would mean.  "For what he's tried to do to you?  Death would be too kind."

The lift chimes, and Watson's hand shoots out, wrapping around the fabric of Jamie's sweater and halting her from her forward progress. "Stop that," she says, and her eyes are dark and shining.  Jamie tries to take in the light of this place, the mystery behind them.  This is what her study of her downfall is missing, that luminosity.  She has to remember it to recreate it.

She's caught up, thinking of the light and of Watson, that the words slip dumbly from her lips before she can catch them. She knows what Watson wants her to stop doing, and she isn't going to.  "Stop what?"

Watson is staring at her, her face open and her expression is one that Jamie knows well.  She's seen it on Sherlock's face, intentionally put it there only to shatter it with a few choice words.  Now though, to see it without prompting, Jamie feels like there's a weight pressed down on her shoulder blades, slowly crushing the life from her.  It's a look of tentative attraction, and of the revulsion that comes with feeling it.  She knows she’s a monster.

She looks down, at her feet in low heels despite the lateness of the hour, back up to Jamie. "Acting as though I'm somehow important to you.  We both know that you're not capable of emotions like that."

Jamie pulls away from Watson, keys in her and heads to the door of what has become her sanctum.  She's turned the key in the lock before Watson steps out of the lift, trailing like a silent shadow behind Jamie.  Jamie decides in that moment that she must show Joan her half-finished portrait.  She turns the key back and the door unlocks. "You'd be surprised, Joan," she says, pushing the door open, "At what I'm capable of."

**screaming out a language (I never knew)**

Coming here had not been an easy decision to make, as was the decision came with a heavier cost than Joan could have ever anticipated.  Joan is not entirely sure that she likes where their conversation is going, or where Moriarty is leading her, deeper and deeper into a relatively residential building.  It could be a trap; she could end up murdered on the floor in some empty loft.  And yet, as Moriarty pushes the door open, Joan can't help but feel herself bite back an anticipatory inhale.

They've known for months that Moriarty must have a safe house - or several - in the city.  Tracking her down after the Sonny Park incident had apparently not been a priority for Sherlock.  Joan thinks that he's extending her a professional courtesy because of her assistance with that case and what she'd done to Sonny Park.  She knows that it is what he wished he could have done himself.

She's seen that darkness in Sherlock, the grim acceptance that sometimes violence was the only acceptable answer.  He'd been fully prepared to murder Sebastian Moran, and Moriarty as well, until that rather complicated situation had spirited well and truly out of their control.

Now Joan doesn't know where they stand with Moriarty, or where Moriarty stands with them.  She and Sherlock are arguing about how to handle the situation, and Joan can't ignore all that Sherlock cannot bring himself to say about this situation that is rapidly developing between Moriarty and herself.

Coming here, Joan knows, is a mistake.  She wants to know more about Moriarty's concern that someone is trying to kill her, to kill both of them.  Moriarty is not the sort of person who thinks of such things idly, and if she perceives a threat they probably have a reason to be worried.

The door opens to reveal a clean, white space.  A large canvas is leaning up against the far wall, a half-finished face just barely coaxed out of the under painting.  To Joan's right there is a kitchenette and beyond it looks like a bathroom.  A bed is shoved into the opposite corner from the canvas, and the room is dominated by a long table that sits dividing the floor-to-ceiling windows.  Papers and books are set upon it in not exactly neat piles, a laptop and computer monitor are set off to one side, and there are photographs, matte eight-by-tens, resting in a pile half on the keyboard.

"This..." Joan begins, because she cannot believe of all the potential safe houses, Moriarty brought her to this particularly one.  This is where she's been living for the past few months clearly, and Joan likes it.  It feels like Moriarty, or rather it feels like Jamie, the woman beneath the mask that Joan's caught glimpses of on occasion. "This is your studio space."

"Mn," Moriarty responds, non-committal. She slips past Joan into the kitchenette to collect the teakettle from the stove and moving to fill it at the sink.  There are a collection of paintbrushes in the dish drain, and a number is painted onto Moriarty's wrist.

"What's that?"  Joan asks, as Moriarty dries her hands and sets the kettle on the tiny, two-burner stove. The number 376 is like a yellow tattoo against Moriarty's skin, half-hidden by her sweater.

Moriarty glances down.  "A meditation," she says, twisting her wrist to look at the numbers for a moment.  She tugs her sweater sleeve back over them and turns on the stove, listening as it clicks twice before springing to life and adjusting it to so that the blue flames don’t burn quite so hot.  "That will go unfinished tonight."

Joan's eyes narrow and she turns to look over her shoulder at the work table and the half-finished painting in the corner.  It's familiar, somehow.  There's a quality in the half-rendered face that draws Joan in, makes her want to look and linger.  It is a dissection of something, an examination of all parts to the whole.

And it is entirely too personal.  Joan wraps her arms around herself, feeling overdressed and too warm in this stuffy little space.  "You shouldn't have brought me here," she says, biting at her lip and nervously glancing around.  She feels out of place, a square peg in a round hole.  This is a place where crime is committed, plotted out, sent to be executed.

The kettle whistles not long after Joan makes her point and Moriarty soon is shoving a mug of brewing tea into her hands, a question on her lips as Joan helplessly looks down at the cup and then back to the half-finished painting. "Why ever not?" she asks, poking at the teabag in her own mug with a spoon.

 _As if it isn't obvious_.  Joan doesn't like to state the obvious very much, because it feels insulting on so many levels.  Moriarty wants her to say it, but Joan can't... she won’t... explain the reasons why.  They're too complex, too, too _hard_ for Joan to stomach and she's stuck lingering, worried.

She wants to be here, she wants to ... she doesn’t even know what the hell she wants.  She wants to understand Moriarty's motivations for even asking her back to this place.  She has to understand so she cannot fall into the same trap that Sherlock had.  "Because I could tell someone and they'd arrest you - you did break out of prison, despite all the work you've done to help us recently." She sighs, sipping her tea to give herself a chance to pause, weak though the brew currently is.  “They do still want to put you back in there.”

Moriarty crosses to her worktable and starts to take things from her purse.  Two phones, a small black notebook, a pistol and silencer.  Joan swallows her mouthful of too-hot tea, watching with careful eyes as Moriarty pulls the bullet that's loaded from the chamber out and switches the safety back on before setting it down carefully on top of a stack of books that appear to be pharmaceutical textbooks.  Joan's seen a few in her day, and her eyes narrow, just looking at them.

"I don't think you'll do that, Joan," Moriarty says, leaning over and hitting the space bar on the laptop’s keyboard.  It whirrs to life and as Joan's irritation spikes, the computer reads a line of code that Moriarty appears to recognize and she makes a content sound at the back of her throat before closing the laptop.

"And why is that?"  Joan asks.

Moriarty smiles a small, closed-off sort of smile and gestures with a careless hand towards the painting that dominates the corner of the apartment's single room.  Joan follows her gaze; numbers still painted on her wrist, and realizes something that horrifies her.  It's a painting of her face, slashed in perfect oils across a canvas that's taller than Joan is.

Sherlock had said that Moriarty didn't do original work - Irene had told him that and even after the realization of who Irene truly was, it had held true.

So why was she painting Joan's face in a style that seemed to be truly unique to her?

"Because you're curious, same as I am."  Moriarty says, the smile growing wider.  She steps forward, into Joan's personal space, and her fingers shoot out to take hold of the open front of her jacket.  She's so close that Joan can see her eyes as they survey her with intrigued intent.  She holds her tea between them like a shield, afraid of what might happen if Moriarty were to lean in, to kiss her again.  There's a bed right there and Joan isn't sure that they'd even make it that far.

Moriarty takes the tea from Joan's hands, setting it beside her own mug, her gaze never leaving Joan's. "You are an enigma, Joan Watson, one I want to understand.  I bear you no ill will; surely you know that by now?" Joan knows what Moriarty wants, she's so close, so impossibly close and her breath is warm on Joan's lips.  There are questions, questions and answers that Joan isn't sure she wants, but as Moriarty leans in Joan knows that this, this inevitable feeling a desperation that seems to ooze off of Moriarty in such close proximity is not an act.  She cannot help herself and she's shoving all the game pieces, one by one, into Joan's hands. "I merely want to know you."

Joan doesn't move, their lips are a hairs breath apart, Moriarty's fingers are clutching her lapels and her eyes are shining like a dark sea at night. "And showing me this place?" she asks.

"Call it... an opening gambit."  She leans in then, and kisses Joan like it's the movies.  Joan doesn't swoon, she can’t because it would be too easy to concede this as a defeat and she won't let Moriarty have the satisfaction.  She lets Moriarty tug off her jacket, and it is as she's trying not to let herself get steered back towards the bed in the corner that she catches sight of the pictures that Moriarty had pushed aside from her computer keyboard not moments earlier.

She pulls away, her jacket falling to the floor, and Moriarty follows her gaze.  Her expression is careful, but it is not the schooled blank mask that Joan might have expected.  It's almost worried looking as Joan carefully tugs the stack towards her and reads the note written in sharpie over the first picture.  A threat to Moriarty, using the name Irene Adler as a cover.

"This is why you killed her," Joan breathes, even though she knows that Moriarty would never come out and confirm that it was her.  An eye for an eye and soon the world would be dead or blind.  She feels sick to her stomach, the memory of the warm press of Moriarty against her, the kisses and the desperate feel enough to turn her dinner into a putrid mass of bile that threatens to spill out from behind clenched teeth.

She cannot. She simply cannot.  Moriarty is a monster - a murderer.  Sherlock is right that this can only end badly.

"I never said I did," Moriarty says, taking the photos from Joan's hands and flipping them, her eyes downcast.  "But this would be enough of a motive for force me to act, Joan, you must understand that I do not allow traitors within my ranks to draw breath once they make themselves known."  She says it with such practicality, her eyes flashing a steely blue in the dim light of this space.

She's throwing Joan a thread of a conversation, trying to draw Joan away from the fact that it is her head that is framed in the scope in those pictures, it isn't just the recollection of an alias long-since burned despite the Oscar-worthy acting performance that Moriarty had put on to keep it alive.  Her hand had been forced then too.

Joan swallows down her revulsion, the twisted feeling of this woman curling around her heart like the serpent in the garden, whispering cruel words and deceptions designed to make Joan fall.  She should know better, she should be able to stop this, to walk away and to tell Moriarty that she never wants to see her again.

It would be so easy to do that, to walk out of this place and forget about it all together.  She could tell Sherlock that she'd gone for a drink with Emily or something.  The lie would slip easily from her lips, she's grown accustomed to lying to Sherlock about she'd been.

She knows she cannot walk away without the answers though.  It is a deep, visceral need that Joan's never truly understood about herself.  She was always the child asking why in school, in that one aborted attempt at going to church when she was all of eight years old. She couldn't be satisfied with knowing less than the whole truth of a matter.  She's like them in that respect, and she wonders if they've even noticed it. She knows she'll come back if she just walks away. "Is this threat... creditable?" she asks.

"Considering that Mr. Tenimont received a similar series before Marie Montclair's murder, I should think so." Moriarty raises a single crooked finger, drawing Joan's attention the far wall that she wasn’t able to see from the doorway.  On the wall there is a collection of photographs and printouts, a picture of Martin Haufman front and center.  Joan's eyes narrow, looking at the picture of the man that Marcus and Gregson had spent most of the night interviewing before handing him off to Brooklyn Special Victims.  A small smile flits across Moriarty's face. "Thanks to Mr. Haufman's unfortunate predilection and his desperation to keep his deviancy a secret, I was able to gain access to T-MIT Pharmaceutical’s database. I was looking for something else, but imagine my surprise when I found these."

Joan doesn't dare ask her what she was looking for.  Moriarty turns and opens the laptop, bending and typing in a series of random letters and numbers so fast that Joan could barely follow after the first two or three keys were pressed.  The screen winks into life and Moriarty straightens, tapping the spacebar twice.  "This is a cloned version of Marc Tenimont's hard drive," she explains, navigating with her index finger to his email application.  She clicks down to a specific email within his junk mail folder and opens it.  "Come look."

There are accusations on Joan's lips almost effortlessly, of her assumption that Moriarty had planted that evidence to show her exactly what she wanted Joan to see and nothing more than that.  She pushes them back, and leans through a series of photographs in the same style as the ones of her, of Sherlock.  They're all of Marie Montclair, and the timestamp indicates that they'd been taken sometime during the previous week.  October 3rd, the first image reads.  It is, Joan checks her watch, after midnight and now the tenth.

"Is there any indication that he tried to do anything about it?"  Joan asks, leaning in closer.  Their heads are right next to each other, and she can hear Moriarty's breathing, slow and even, in her ear.  "What are you after with Tenimont?"  she adds.

"I want him humiliated and his business destroyed," Moriarty says, paging through a useless email with a fitness club promotion attached.  She's looking for something that Joan knows she probably won't see, she has so little experience with computer hacking.  Sherlock's better, but he usually leaves his most complicated hacks to the anonymous coalition of hackers he knows online.  "Ah,” Moriarty clicks into another email.  She reads for a moment, her face falling into a half-frown. "That's odd."

"What is?"  Joan asks.  The lines of text seem completely random.

_"Why did the snake circle the apple tree?  To jump from a high place from here, obviously.  The predatory prey it is not."_

"It's a code," Moriarty answers, her lips moving over the words.  There's a troubled look about her, and by the way her lips twist in annoyance as she reads the words again Joan realizes that she doesn’t know what it means and it has ... _unsettled_ her.  "One I do not know."

Joan straightens, reaching out, tentatively, touching Moriarty's back.  "Something isn't adding up here."

"Tell me about it," Moriarty mutters darkly.  She closes the mirrored hard drive and turns to stare at the far wall, so reminiscent to how Sherlock himself processes cases.  "I had wanted to startle Tenimont, to find some evidence of his production of meth or heroin at that facility.  I never..."  She levels a glare at Martin Haufman's picture.  "Someone is targeting you, again, and I fear that this will not cease until the entirety of that organization is dead and gone."

"If they're producing drugs in that facility clandestinely, why not simply get them arrested?"  Joan asks mildly, even though she thinks she knows the answer. Moriarty perceives what Sonny Park did to her as a life debt owed by the entire PKE Group.  Two have already died, even if there's no evidence at all linking Moriarty's people to Phillipe Montclair's death.  The pound of flesh will continue to be extracted.  She swallows, nervously.  "I mean, it is illegal and will result in a huge scandal and destroy their reputations."

"I need more than the documentation I found," Moriarty replies moodily, walking across the room and ripping down Martin Haufman's picture.  She stares at it, held between two hands, and then holds it up for Joan to see.  "I was lucky to find him, you know.  And I promised him that I would not tell anyone of his erm - predilections."

"But you did," Joan points out.

Moriarty sighs and begins to rip the picture into smaller and smaller squares, the obscuring his face, her movements jerky and angry.  "I did no such thing, Joan," she says dismissively.  "He did that all himself.  I certainly never told him to open that file with my program running."

"Semantics."

"Reasonable doubt, in your courts' vernacular."

Joan rolls her eyes.  It is nearly one and Joan can barely disguise a yawn.  "I should go home," she says, because she hasn't told Sherlock where she is.  She's curious if Moriarty will refuse her, tell her she can't leave.

"I'd offer you my car, but my driver is attending to another matter," Moriarty's lips purse into a thin line.  She's weighing a possibility, her whole body a picture of put-on indecisiveness.  It all seems too rehearsed, too practiced.  An opening gambit this is not, but rather castling the king. "You should stay.  I'll see you home before you're missed in the morning."

"I'm already missed, Jaime."

She cocks her head to one side, the pieces of Martin Haufman falling useless to the floor around her.  There is a vulnerability about her then, like what Joan had seen that day when she'd gunned down Camille Vincent.  The desperate look about her as she tried to win Joan's approval, or maybe it was merely her affection.  Regardless, it is strange, alien on her. "Maybe I simply wish for you to stay."

Joan glances towards the corner.  "You only have one bed."

She's met with a raised eyebrow.  "I didn't intend on sleeping tonight."

-

They do not, as it turns out, do anything at all in that bed besides sleep. Jamie rises at four-thirty in the morning and puts the kettle on for tea.  At first, Joan doesn't stir, but the low murmur of conversation, half an hour later, is enough to pull her from sleep.

Moriarty is standing before her canvas, cup of tea in her hand and a pensive expression on her face as she speaks to a tall, dark-skinned man in an expensive looking suit.  Moriarty's gaze slides from him to Joan as she sits up, blankets tangled around her waist.  "Good," she says.  "You're awake."

Joan takes the blanket with her as she gets up and winces as she puts her bare feet on the ice cold floor of the studio.  Moriarty is wearing warm-looking socks and a robe, her hair still tussled from sleep.  If Moriarty objects to Joan unmaking her bed to take the warmth with her, she doesn't say anything at all, and Joan pads over to shake the newcomer's hand.  "Michael Collins," he says.

"Joan Watson," she answers and her voice sounds half-asleep still.

He has a charming smile, like Marcus', and it blossoms across his face despite the earliness of the hour.  "I know," he jokes, tapping the side of his nose.  Joan smiles wearily at him.  Of course he does.

"There's hot water if you want tea," Moriarty offers.  "Mr. Collins is going to drive you home."  She glances back to her painting.  "Unless you would be amenable to continuing our discussion of Marc Tenimont's company?"

Joan shakes her head.  She doesn't want to linger, and Sherlock will have enough questions as it is. "I should go home," she sighs and runs a tired hand through her hair.  "I messed up your bed…” she adds.

“It’s nothing,” Moriarty replies.  Seemingly understanding that he’s meant to make himself scarce, Mr. Collins disappears off into the kitchenette and they're alone once more.  Moriarty's fingers tangle in the duvet that Joan has wrapped around her shoulders and she kisses Joan like she's salvation and damnation all rolled into one.  Her lips feel swollen, bruised almost, when Moriarty pulls away.  They're so impossibly close together that when Moriarty breathes the truth in her ear, it feels like a slap in the face.

"I have killed, and I would kill again, to keep you safe Joan," She rises on her toes and presses her lips to Joan's forehead.  "Please don't ever forget that."

Joan leaves without ceremony some ten minutes later and promising to get in touch with Moriarty as soon as they find out anything on Tenimont, because something truly isn't adding up and if Moriarty's bothered something as simple as a cypher, she cannot help but think of how troubled Sherlock will be over all that has just transpired over the course of this night.

Mr. Collins doesn't speak as he drives, and Joan knows that it's early, but she tries her mother anyway, rolling up the privacy screen and listening to the pulsating ringing in her ear.

"You're up early," her mother says when she picks up after the third ring.  There is an amused pause, where her mother pretends that she isn’t thinking anything else, before she adds, "Or have you not gone to bed?"

Joan exhales, her whole body feeling heavy and exhausted.  "I did a stupid thing, Ma."

This is a conversation that they've had many times over the course of Joan's life.  Joan tries to leave her mother out of her work with Sherlock, for the most part.  She doesn't really understand, and she seems to think that Joan's going to get herself killed.  After Sonny Park, Joan had felt the feeling of invincibility slip away between her grasping fingers. Her mother hadn't understood that either, but she'd been there, giving Joan a shoulder to cry on.

"What did you do," Her mother asks. Her voice is quiet, kind, there's no hidden agenda behind it.  Joan breathes a quiet sigh of relief.

"There's this..." She runs a tired hand through her hair, encountering tangles and slowly working them out as she tilts her head back to stare at the ceiling of Moriarty’s very nice town car.  "God, I don't even to know what to call her..."

What could she call Moriarty that would make her mother understand just how dangerous she was, how terrifying?  There have been women in her past, women that have hurt Joan so badly that she's confessed their presence in her life to her mother despite her entire upbringing screaming at her to stay silent.

Joan takes a deep, calming breath, watching as the car moves smoothly down the road towards home and the inevitable confrontation that awaits her there. "Do you remember Maggie Olsen, my roommate sophomore year?"

Sighing, her mother makes an affirmative noise.  "The one you were involved with?  Joanie, I've told you a million times that getting involved with girls will lead to nothing but unhappiness."  She pauses, and then adds, a bit apprehensively.  "Joan, I know you can get very attached to people that you don't understand."

And there it is, said plain as the run rising up over the city.  Proof of all that she wants to deny about herself, until she's blue in the face and the lie seems believable.  She decided to stay with Sherlock because of the puzzle he presented, because the work kept her mind focused on the things she liked to do, and now she's drawn into this web of Moriarty for the same reason.  The woman is an enigma, and she's trying very hard to make it clear to Joan that she's interested, should Joan be as well.

"I know," she says, very quietly.  It is her whole truth, the thing she cannot run away from.  "I know and I want to stay away but it's so hard, ma..."

She's full of the urge then, to roll down the partition and ask if Mr. Collins will drive her to Flushing to see her mother.  It will only delay the inevitable, though, and she knows better than to do that. Sherlock will want to know where she's gone, and Joan wants to discuss what Moriarty is up to with him, to see what he thinks.

The conversation flows from there, confessions and begging for absolution that her mother cannot give.  It is not her, after all, that Joan is betraying with this prolonged interaction.

"Call me later," her mother says, some fifteen minutes later, when the car slows and Joan finds herself facing Mr. Collins' dark eyes in the rear view mirror.  She hangs up the phone after a quick good-bye and sits back, fingers curling around her purse straps.

Mr. Collins says nothing at all when she lets herself out of the car.  He regards her for a moment as she stands on the steps up to the brownstone's front door before he shifts the car into gear and drives off.  Joan watches him go, and turns to head inside, facing the music, the inevitable explosion, that she's sure is about to come.

"Marc Tenimont is involved with the PKE Group," she calls, shrugging off her jacket and shoes by the door.  She can hear Sherlock puttering around in the library, and she's surprised that he hasn't come storming over, all accusatory finger jabs and hurt eyes.  "They're manufacturing meth off the books at their plant in Jersey City."

She ventures into the library feeling almost tentative with each step. Sherlock is sitting with his legs crossed in his arm chair, a cup of coffee in one hand and half a bagel in the other.  He looks as tired as Joan feels.

"You slept with her," he says, his expression almost schooled blank. There's a little quiver about his chin and his eyes are hurt-looking as he says it, and she can tell that he thinks he's covered it up well.

Joan sighs, folds her arms over her chest, and leans against the doorway.  "I stayed there because it was too late to come back.  The trains weren't running but every half hour and I was tired."  She glowers at him, added, maybe a little too defensively. "And it's really none of your business what I do with her."

"I feel like I would be remiss if I didn't point out that she is a murderer.  She has murdered people, murdered them in front of you, I might add, and you seem remarkably blasé about the whole thing."  He gets to his feet and crosses to set his coffee cup on the mantle.  "She means to destroy you, Watson, I don't know how yet, but she's only ever wanted to know how you work.  Once she does, it is only a matter of time before she takes you apart and leaves the pieces of you scattered about like a discarded toy."

"I didn't sleep with her," Joan says, very quietly.  There had been no sex, after all.  "I just stayed there.  We talked about the case until close to two."  She reaches out, fingers hovering over his shoulder before she finally does touch the warm cotton of his t-shirt.  "I could... I could never do that to you."

It was a slippery slope, that lie, there is an inevitability about the pull of between them, and Joan isn't sure she'll be able to stop it before it gets entirely out of hand.

Sherlock fixes her with a look that tells Joan all that her lie is fairly transparent, but he lets the subject drop, turning and heading towards the computer.  "I got an email a few minutes ago from an anonymous sender.  It appears that Moriarty is interested in sharing information."

Joan nods.  "She told me that she used Martin Haufman to plant some sort of virus in T-MIT Pharm's computer system. She seemed utterly unrepentant about getting him caught."

He makes a humming sound, pulling up the cloned screenshots of Marc Tenimont's personal email accounts and the cypher that Moriarty did not recognize.  "Usually, I hold blackmailers in a class all of their own, but what Martin Haufman is is far, far worse than any blackmailer's crime.  She did the world a public service," Sherlock sighs.  "And she is well aware of the goodwill that doing so will garner her, especially from _you_."

The pictures came next, Joan explaining that there are ones of them that were sent to Moriarty - and that they know of the Irene Adler alias.  "That would mean it is someone very close to her, or someone in the NYPD," she concludes and Sherlock is scratching at three days of beard, a pensive look on his face.

"What is to say that her little digital intrusion, sent in with Martin Haufman, didn't plant this evidence?" he asks.  "You say that you asked her point blank if she killed Marie Montclair, she has every reason in the world to lie, Watson."

Joan bites her lip and looks down at her hands.  "I know," she says, her voice barely above a whisper.  She knows exactly who Moriarty is, exactly what she is.  She's whispered the truth, the terrible, horrible truth, and Joan isn't ready to swallow that damnation just yet.  "I... I suppose that it's easier to believe a frame-up job, given who she is, than a leak within her own organization."

Sherlock's expression is grim.  "Yes," he says, staring at the screen.  "I suppose it is."

-

Jamie stares at the cypher, scrawled hastily across the back of one of one of the glossy photographs that she's been sent of Watson.  She's tapping her finger against her chin, distractedly listening as Mr. Collins makes tea in the kitchen.

She didn't plant this evidence.  She had always meant to frame Tenimont for Marie Montclair's murder, and the email that she had shown Watson had been fabricated.  This, though, this is a new mystery. One she cannot wrap her head around.

"The news is about to come on," Collins calls.  Jamie's lips twitch upwards into a small smile and she leans over to her laptop.  She's pulled up her usual news site and has powered on the sound by the time Mr. Collins emerges from the kitchenette with two mugs of tea balanced in his hands.  He sets one down in front of Jamie and glances at the cypher.

"No luck?" he asks, inclining his head towards it.

Jamie pushes it away, scowling.  "None." She's tried all the usual cyphers and is starting onto the unusual ones.  She'd thought it was a simple word substitution algorithm, but she's stumped. This is a wrench into her plans that she had not anticipated.  She twists the words around in her head, trying to see meaning in them beyond what she cannot see.   There is none, there never was any, really.  It reads like nonsense.

"Maybe it isn't a cypher," Collins suggests, sipping his tea.  The bags under his eyes are dark even against his dark skin and Jamie feel the briefest pang of guilt, knowing that it's only going to get worse before it gets better for them all.  The caffeine in the tea will help, at least.  "But a coded phrase?"

"Codes can be broken, Mr. Collins," Jamie replies darkly.  She picks up the piece of paper where she's scribbled down the code, the numbers that she'd left on her wrist last night still evident despite rubbing against her jumper all night, and scowls down at it.  There isn't anything in these words that carries meaning, it just seems like nonsense.  Collins could have a point, but they will never know unless they ask Mark Tenimont himself what it's all supposed to mean.  "The same as cyphers.  It is just a matter of understanding what it means."

The news broadcast begins and Jamie finds herself only half-paying attention.  She has given them all they need to work themselves into a frenzy, the media have always been stupidly easy to control.  She doesn't particularly care what is said now, just that it's said and that there is discussion of sanctions.

Her decision to share information with Sherlock had not come easily.  She knows that it will give him a window into her mind, into what she's planning on doing, and that it would be extraordinarily easy to infer what she is planning, should he bother to actually think about it.  Jamie is counting on him being too caught up in what Watson is doing, in being angry at her for staying out with Jamie all night.  For the implied sex that they did not have.

Sherlock distracted would not notice these things, and Jamie fully intents on taking the game that Watson so evidently wants to play a step further, once she figures out this bloody cypher.

Jamie watches Mr. Collins watch the news, taking in how he scratches at his three-day old beard and how even his movements seem exhausted.  She knows that she should tell him to get some sleep, at least until they have something to go on, but she cannot do that.  Compassion, kindness, that is not who she is and she does not want Collins to see that she is concerned that he will not be able to execute her wishes to the best of his ability.  It is a weakness that she cannot afford.

He yawns though, widely and openly, dark cheeks coloring as he looks down awkwardly and takes half a step away from her.

"You have failed to produce either Westin or his lover," Jamie comments dryly, staring into a new cypher key, the code from the Zimmerman Telegraph.  She doesn't understand why she is getting nowhere with this, numbers are a familiar constant in her life.  It is not one that she broadcasts regularly to her underlings, however.  Sherlock knows, because he surely must at this point.  It's not like her name is particularly hard to find at her university, and there are published papers in her name that could be found, if one knew where to look.  Watson probably knows as well, but she's kept it out of their conversations and Jamie hasn't found cause to mention it.  She doesn’t want to, for no real discernable reason that she can think of, and the thought of it irritates her.

She's picking her words very carefully, regarding Mr. Collins and knowing that he can feel the intensity of her gaze.  There's a tension between them that Jamie knows cannot come from anything other than what Collins has been tasked to do.  Jamie does not jump to conclusions or act without premeditation and Collins knows that.  Westin is the only possible, the only logical, explanation for the leak within the organization.

"It isn't for lack of trying, mum," Mr. Collins says, his lips tugging downwards into a frown.  She can see the pressure that he's under, and how it's causing his usual steadiness to crumble into uncertainty.  "I've been out of the game in this city for close to a year."

"Your mum... right," Jamie says, scowling down at the random collection of letters that make even less sense than the phrase that she'd started with.  She draws a line through her decryption and starts anew, scribbling the letters of an old French cypher, only half remembered at the top and twisting them around, trying to see meaning in words where no meaning, she's rapidly concluding, is contained.  "Take the day," she says abruptly, standing and leaning over the silence the news broadcast.

"-- _Marc Tenimont, CEO and majority owner of the company has issued a statement.  He says that his company is in full compliance to any and all federal regulations.  He went on to add that these allegations are utterly baseless, despite the fact that the FDA has had a marked presence at his offices all week_ \--"

Again, the cypher key she's tried leads to nothing.  Jamie leans over the table; her palms planted on either side of her notepad, and ignores Collins as he beats a hasty retreat.  _Smart man_ , Jamie thinks.  The door is barely closed before frustration she feels at being unable to solve Tenimont's cypher boils over and the tea that Collins had shoved into her hands goes flying almost effortlessly in a moody swipe of her hand, landing with a clatter of broken ceramics on the hardwood floor of the studio.

The PKE Group have been a thorn in her side for too long.  Marc Tenimont thinks he's safe behind his prestigious title and profitable business, but he is wrong.  Jamie can get to him there, she can get to him anywhere, and he should know better than to threaten her people after what Jamie has done to Peddicort and Montclair.  The fact that he's done it, that he's defied her explicit wishes again and again, is a slap in the face to Jamie and she will not suffer his life long in this world.

Watson had been right, after all, she is going to kill them all.

The cypher sits, mockingly, on the table before her, and rapidly cooling tea is now soaking into her socks, the remnants of the broken mug a veritable nightingale floor to cross.  Jamie regards it with narrowed eyes, thinking that he would be able to solve it, and know that that is something she cannot possibly offer him.  He's good with maths, same as her.  She's better, naturally, but he has a rare talent for numbers and patterns, he might be able to help.

Jamie tosses her pen down onto her pad and turns, bending to pick up the largest of the bits of broken ceramic.  She can't solve this, but she knows that it means one of two things.  Marc Tenimont had contracted the killer that Jamie has framed for Marie Montclair's murder, or he's called the rest of the board members together.  As Jamie is almost certain that Sam Westin is the killer in question, the latter option seems preferable.

If Tenimont has brought the rest of them in, Jamie can have them finished all at once.  The idea has its appeal. They'd leave Watson alone, the organization would be in shambles and maybe Jamie will then be able to reap the benefits of their smuggling and drug-running operations being gone from the city.  Tenimont's operation, large-scale as it is, is in an incredibly tricky position that Jamie appreciates.  It is not the sort of operation that Jamie would ever want to take over, especially now that she's outed his supply chain.

Besides, the more legitimate aspects of her enterprise are such that Jamie scarcely need tend to them these days.  They run autonomously, for the most part, and what little supervision they do need has always come naturally to Jamie.  She likes the maths, the numbers and the business aspect of it.  She prefers the underbelly, the darker elements, the dealing in information and secrets, the murder and the mayhem that she can cause in a single, well-orchestrated plot. There are times when Jamie thinks almost ruefully of her Macedonia plot.  It had been so perfect, so absolutely perfect, and then Joan Watson had stumbled her way into the middle of it and completely and utterly destroyed Jamie with a few well-placed words and one fake drug overdose all on her own.   Sherlock, Jamie had made sure, was in no position to help her.

She throws away the broken pieces of her mug and collects a hand towel to clean up the spilled tea from the sink.  She knows better than to dwell on that moment of defeat, although she's gone over it and over it, a thousand strokes, all in her head, more times than she cares to count.  It is the same frustration, irritation at her failure and inability to see the truth, that she feels now, the cypher laughing at her from the desk where she's discarded it and her pen.

Standing, wet towel still in hand, Jamie reaches for her phone, typing out a message that she knows will get her what she wants.

_"How would you like to catch Tenimont in the act?"_

Jamie closes her eyes, a fragment of a thought occurring to her.  She follows it, eyes half-closed and her phone's screen dimming and finally going blank.  Westin had spoken at length of his girlfriend to Collins when they thought Jamie wasn't paying attention during the course of the past few months.  Her family was Russian; they lived in Brighton Beach, if Jamie remembered an off-hand comment Westin had made, once up on a time, correctly.

It is the last place she'd ever look for a British citizen of Chinese heritage.  Her eyes narrow, and her fingers fly over her phone screen, searching and finding all the answers she wants, and then several she's ... almost disappointed to read.

The police scanners have picked up reports of a disturbance, gunshots and screaming, in an apartment above a bodega.  Two bodies, both DOA.  She doesn’t have to look much further than that for confirmation of identities of the dead; she can read between the lines and understand what isn’t being said over the radio.

It is a blood bath, and Jamie did not orchestrate it.  She scowls.  It's a pity; really, Jamie would have loved to ask Westin what he was planning.  She would have asked so nicely, she would have painted a mural in his blood until she was satisfied with his answers, twisting a knife in his gut to ensure that his betrayal was as painful for him as it was for her.

Someone had stolen that from her.

And she intended to make them pay for taking away her revenge.

-

Marcus calls mid-morning, after Joan's spent the better part of an hour debating with Sherlock if she should take Moriarty's oh-so-enticing bait.  He's insistent that Joan's going to get hurt, should she go.  Joan knows that, but she'd also seen Moriarty's face when she'd been faced with that cypher that she couldn't solve instantly.  She wants to see that through, despite all the dire warnings and her better angels screaming at her to stay well away from Moriarty when she's like this. She wants to see the look of elation on Moriarty’s face when she cracks the code and figures out what it means.

"You guys are going to want to come down here and see this," he says.  There's a haunted note in his voice, and it is quite unlike anything that Joan has ever heard before.  Marcus is usually steady, constant.  He's good under pressure and doesn’t falter.  To hear something that almost sounds like panic in his voice is enough to make Joan swallow nervously as she asks him for the address.

"We'll be there soon," she promises. “Forty-five minutes at most.” Sherlock is already halfway into his shoes and coat and Joan's quick on his heels.  He's evidentially called a cab while she was on the phone with Marcus, because one pulls up outside of the house some five minutes later.

They sit in silence, not looking at each other, the intensity and desperation of their morning of conversation not lost on either of them.  Joan taps her fingers on her phone, breathing as steadily as she can and know, perhaps even without any actual confirmation, that what they're about to see will be bad.  Very bad.

"I still think she's lying about Marie Montclair," Sherlock says quietly.

"Of _course_ she is, Sherlock," Joan says, because that's entirely not what they've been arguing about at all.  "She obviously either did it herself, or knows exactly who did.  She sent you all that information on Tenimont because she wants you looking at him."  What Joan doesn't mention is that, especially see how he's been all morning, that her decision to stay there the previous night had been anticipated and probably even counted on by Moriarty.  She puffs out her cheeks, wishing, desperately wishing, that she could do it all again and turn down that friendly smile and polite request to stay.

His leg is bouncing, up and down up and down, a mile a minute.  Their cabbie regards him in the rear-view mirror as they wait at a traffic light, and Joan reaches over, her fingers brushing on his pant leg, stilling the constant tap, tap, tap of his heel against the cab's floorboards.

He looks at her, eyes wide and full of frustration and fear and worry all at once.  "She's a murderer, Joan," he says, and there's a desperate edge to his voice that Joan can't shake or move away from.  She knows, she knows and oh god, she wishes that she didn't.  "She's a murderer who is taking full advantage of the fact that you've been needing saving, these past few months."

"I know," Joan says, turning to stare out the window as the cab lurches forward to dodge almost gracefully through the traffic of Brooklyn at mid-morning.  She purses her lips, hating that she is so drawn to the puzzle of Sherlock, of Moriarty, of this life that is so unlike anything she'd ever pictured for herself.  "As much as I think I know her, I feel as though I've become something of a blind spot for her."  She bites her lip, looking down, and then up to meet his gaze.  "She acts ... rashly, as rashly as someone like her can act, when you are - or I am - involved with something."

"Don't lie to yourself," Sherlock replies, but his fingers are warm, brushing her hand from his leg.  "Your involvement with her serves some nefarious purpose, same as it does with me." He sounds so utterly resigned to it that Joan's heart aches.  "She told me once that she would hurt me, but she'd never kill me.  Sometimes I wonder if this is how she's chosen to go about it."

And Joan can say no more, because there is nothing left that she can say.  She cannot possibly tell Sherlock that that isn't what she'd meant.  Everything that had happened with Moriarty to him before this point, Irene, the escape, Sonny Park, Camille Vincent.  Everything, everything had had a purpose, and Joan cannot see it.  She wants to understand, desperately, and she doesn't think that she ever will.

The problem is that she knows better, and she knows that each and every time she lets Moriarty kiss her it will get worse, the want will linger, the curiosity will never be sated.  She has to know why Moriarty wanted her to stay, beyond the transparent want to throw Sherlock off of his game.

Sherlock is blind to her, and she is blind to Joan.  It's a twisted sort of line that she's at the start of.

Joan rests her chin on her palm, leaning on the arm rest of the door and watching the city fly by around her.  The buildings are growing older, more and more signs are appearing in Cyrillic.  Joan can't read them, but as they pull up to the address that Marcus had given them, Joan feels a sick feeling of dread settle over her.  Sherlock pays the cabbie and she stands out in the crisp October morning, her hands in her pockets, looking around at the neighborhood.

Marcus is standing by the doorway to the walkup, eating an apple and scowling at the cloudy sky.  "It's going to rain," he says, in lieu of a greeting.  He looks exhausted.

"Quite," Sherlock agrees.

They stand while Marcus finishes his apple, throwing it away in a trashcan on the corner.  He has Vick’s Vaporub smeared under his nose and Joan quickly takes the jar when he hands it to her.  Sherlock turns it down, muttering about having all of his senses indicted and not addled by the overpowering scent of mint, eucalyptus and aloe.

"The call came in this morning, the CSU's just about finished photographing everything.  The head told me I looked green so I should eat something, otherwise I'd still be up here," Marcus explains as they head up the dirty, steep stairs to the second floor of the building.  It's short, but tall for the area, maybe seven stories, Joan hadn't thought to count the windows.  He pauses, standing by the door and indicating the white scarf that Joan had wrapped hurriedly around her neck before they'd left home.  "You might want to put that away," he adds, "it's a bloodbath in there."

Joan swallows, tucking her scarf into her jacket, and steps into the door that Marcus indicates. No matter how many times she’s done this, the death is still overwhelming at times. It all seems so wasteful, senseless.

The first thing that hits her as she steps into the room is the smell.  These bodies have been dead a while, and yesterday had been unseasonably warm and sunny.  The apartment has windows that face the east; they would have gotten a full blast of morning sunlight and cooked for hours before someone noticed.  That would be the cause for the screaming that the report that Marcus' has passed into her hands had noted.

There are two bodies in the room, both of which positively reek.  They smell of warm blood and decay and the purification of flesh left to rot.  There is an undertone of something more foul, shit or vomit, she can’t tell which, and it’s enough to make Joan want to turn around and walk about of this place before she can get far enough in for the smell to start to seep into her clothing.

There's blood everywhere, but the wounds on the victims themselves are fairly pedestrian - at least as pedestrian as one can get with a sawed-off shot gun discarded carelessly by the door.  At Joan's feet there is the body a young woman, still dressed in hospital scrubs and sneakers.  She must have just come into the apartment when she was shot; her keys are not more than a few inches from her right hand.  She’d taken a shot to the chest, and the buckshot has carved a hole in her chest that Joan can’t bear to look at for longer than a few seconds.  She bled out instantly.

"Her name is Shelly Nuren, she's a nurse over at Mercy," Marcus says, looking down at the woman's body, his expression grim, "But she's not why we called you."  He indicates with his pen, notebook clutched in his other hand, at the second body, sprawled out in the hallway that leads back into the apartment, probably to a bathroom or closet space.  Joan’s breath catches in her throat and she sucks in a strong waft of decomposition that makes her stomach turn.  She clutches her hand over her mouth; index finger smearing against the Vick’s that she’s put there.  She knows that man.  She knows him and she knows him well.

Sherlock is squatting down on his toes beside the second corpse, examining the man’s face with a worried look drifting across his own.  “It appears that Moriarty is short another lieutenant,” he says, pressing his hands to his knees and getting to his feet.  “This is the man that Sonny Park shot,” He indicates his head to the man.

Marcus leans forward, pen pointing at the corpse.  “Did you know him?  He had an ID on him, but the name’s a fake, the social it’s connected to belongs to some Pakistani immigrant who lives in Georgia.”  He scowls.  “I hate identity theft.”

Joan stares down at the body of Moriarty’s man, her mind already made up about what she’s going to say to Moriarty.  She’ll play the game, just this once, because no one deserves to die face down and left to rot in a pool of their own vomit.  Buckshot is a bad way to go, especially in the stomach.  He bled out, stomach contents forcing their way out through his throat when the organ was punctured.  “His name is Sam Westin,” she says, her hand still covering her mouth.  “He worked for Moriarty.”


	4. prayers & proclamations (grand days of great men and small gestures)

They're standing over a dead body and Joan is fumbling for the words to explain how the hell she knows who this man, lying in a pool of blood and vomit, was in life.  The answer isn't an easy one, for it involves the very same reasons why there are gaps in her witness statements for each of the previous two encounters that they've had with members - and offshoots - of the PKE Group.  She doesn't want to let on to Marcus how much she's learned about Moriarty's operation during their... Christ, what even would she call what was going on between them?  Flirtation sounded too innocent and attraction made Joan's head ache with the implication of it.

Marcus is staring at her expectantly, expecting her to elaborate on the matter and Joan gets unsteadily to her feet.  She skirts around the puddle of sick, Vick's vaporub on her fingers and tasting like chemicals on her tongue.  "How d'you know him?" Marcus asks.  His expression is gentle, non-judgmental when it really should be condemning Joan to the very gates of hell.  Marcus would tell her to stop this before she gets herself killed or arrested or both.  Marcus, who is steady and has always been the voice of reason, he cannot understand this... whatever it is.

"As Sherlock said," Joan replies, feeling a million miles away. Her ears are ringing.  She knows that mentioning Sonny Park will give her some time, because Marcus respects her and understands how deeply Park's actions have affected Joan.  "He was the man that Sonny Park shot at his storage unit, back in December."

Sherlock seems to sense that Joan is floundering, grasping at straws with nothing she feels she can really say without giving away the parts that he, too, has left out of the official narrative of events.  The tables have turned, and where Joan has left him to fib his way out of things before, he covers for her smoothly.  "During the Camille Vincent investigation we came into contact with several of Moriarty's men, Mr. Westin was among them."

"Do you think Moriarty killed him?"  Marcus' eyes slide between Joan and Sherlock before coming back to rest on the body on the ground.

"No," Sherlock answers simply.

"Because that would be too obvious?"

"Quite."  Sherlock steps around Sam Westin's body and bends to look under the couch, a quiet humming at the back of his throat.  Joan watches him curiously, wondering what he's up to until Sherlock's triumphant exhale of breath and his producing a long, flat black case that Joan would have mistaken for an electric guitar case had it been anywhere but in an apartment belonging to a person that Joan knew to be associated with Moriarty and her organization.

"I'm not going to like what I find in here, am I?" Marcus says, using the back of his pen to pry open the clips holding the box shut.

"I expect it will be a fairly large caliber assault rifle," Sherlock says, getting to his feet.  He glances over to Joan, who nods just once.  She's guessed his meaning now, and they'll discuss it later and determine how much she should share with Marcus together.  "Probably with a good scope and a camera mount."

"Why a camera mount?"  Marcus wants to know.

"Before Marie Montclair was killed, Marc Tenimont received a series of photographs in his email," Joan says, her voice feels unsteady as she speaks, but she swallows the fear quickly.  Relaying this information will buy them more time. "We were able to get into his email last night," she adds when Marcus' eyebrows shoot up his forehead.  She's not about to let on that Moriarty has filled them in on that detail, probably to draw attention away from herself and whatever she's really up to.  Joan still isn't sure she wants to know what Moriarty really is up to.  The more she thinks about it, the more Joan thinks that this might all be some elaborate smokescreen, but to what end she does not know.

"Then Moriarty was behind her death, awesome." Marcus smiles, but it falls with a glance between Sherlock and Joan.  "Oh. You don't think so."

Joan inhales Vicks-scented decay and feels her stomach turn at the confession she's about to utter.  Marcus will offer her no absolution for what she's done.  "Moriarty has received similar photographs."

"Of you."

How he's managed to make that inference is beyond her.

"I -- yes."  Joan looks away.  There's nothing she can say to Marcus to make this better, to make this easier. She's going to have to come clean about that much at least.

Marcus looks at the uniformed officers at the door and the CSU guys that are still photographing the apartment.  His voice drops to a low whisper.  "And how did you come to find out about this?"

"She told me."  She might as well stop lying at this point.  "After the Vincent case, she gave me a phone number - it's untraceable, trust me, I already tried - but she got in touch after Marie Montclair's murder and told me about the threats she received."  Joan wraps her arms around herself, the smell of the room almost overwhelming her as she takes a deep, calming breath.  The lie slips easily from her lips after that.  "When we found the same thing on Tenimont's hard drive I started to think that maybe she wasn't involved with Montclair's death - at least not in the way that we'd initially thought."

"So this Sam Westin was a contract killer?"

Joan shrugs.  "I always knew him as one of her more trusted lieutenants."  She sighs and glances at Sherlock.  His eyes are fixed on the bodies on the floor, committing the scene to memory, but he gives a little shrug. He has nothing more that he wants to add, it seems.  "The other one I knew was the guy that Camille Vincent shot back in July."

"Sheng something, right," Marcus nods slowly, pulling the name out of memory and looking as though he's a bit hazy details of the case.  "So Moriarty isn't involved - at least not in the murder proper.  She's just receiving similar threats.  Is there any chance that this Westin character was trying to start some sort of a war between Moriarty's organization and the PKE Group that Phillipe Montclair was associated with?"

Sherlock gets to his feet and strips off his gloves. "I think that there's a very good chance of just that."

**prayers & proclamations (grand days of great men and small gestures)**

It's late when they get back home that night.  The medical examiner had confirmed what they'd already known - both Sam Westin and Shelly Nuren had died of single gunshot wounds.  Gory and gruesome gunshot wounds, but gunshot wounds all the same. Marcus had had uniformed officers conduct interviews of the neighbors, but no one had seen or heard anything.

Even after all the police had left and it was just Sherlock speaking in quiet Russian to the old woman who had been Shelly Nuren's neighbor there was nothing for them to go on.  The killer had come and gone like a ghost - a silent specter in the night.

"Watson, I fear we're in the middle of a gang war," Sherlock confesses as Joan shrugs off her coat and hangs it and Sherlock's scarf up on the coat rack by the door.  He heads downstairs towards the kitchen and Joan follows him, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"I think I might have just helped to frame Sam Westin for Marie Montclair's murder," she says as Sherlock opens the refrigerator and sticks his head inside.  Joan settles herself down at the kitchen table and claps her hands together, leaning on her elbows to watch Sherlock sniff an old box of Chinese, make a face, and move to throw it away.

"That was undoubtedly Moriarty's plan," Sherlock replies, moving back to the refrigerator to pull out another container.  Greek this time, a similar face.  Ms. Hudson evidently hadn't done the refrigerator this most recent visit.  "She knew we'd figure out that she killed Marie Montclair."

"She never said she did."

"But that doesn't mitigate all the flashing neon signs that loudly proclaim that she did," Sherlock replies.  He closes the refrigerator and shakes his head.  "I'm getting food, Thai?"

"Indian."

"Your usual?"

"Please."  Sherlock goes for the menus and Joan fingers her phone and the as of yet unanswered text notification from Moriarty winks into life as she turns on her screen once more.  The unfortunate thing is that Joan doesn't want to accept that Moriarty was involved.  She'd seen the look on her face, the promise of retribution for the threat.  Had Westin sent those?  Was he playing both sides?  If he was, to what end?

Sherlock is wasted on this.  Joan wants to tell him so, to say that she needs to do this, to play Moriarty's game to figure out what Moriarty's after so that she can beat her once again.  Moriarty wants this; she wants them divided so that she can conquer.

But what she wants to conquer is beyond Joan.

Upstairs, the doorbell rings and Sherlock makes a shooing motion for Joan to go an answer it, as he's speaking rapidly over the phone in a language so indecipherable to Joan that she just passes it off as Greek (although thanks to Ms. Hudson, her's is getting better) and heads to get the door.

Marcus is leaning on the door frame, dressed in casual clothes - a t-shirt and faded jeans and his usual jacket.  He's off duty, which is odd when they're in the middle of a murder case.

"Hi," Joan says, feeling awkward and under prepared.

"I need to talk to you."  His expression is full of something that Joan cannot place, but she nods once and steps aside to let him in.  He's got files with him, tucked under his arm.

"Sherlock's just order-"

"I don't want him to hear this," Marcus says shortly.  He inclines his head towards the study and Joan follows him, closing the doors behind her.

"What is it?" she asks, but the feeling of dread has already settled into the pit of her stomach. 

"These are your witness statements from the Sonny Park case and the Camille Vincent case - both of which are tangentially related to this one through the common thread of the PKE Group," Marcus explains, pulling each from its file and passing Joan the typed statements that she'd signed following her involvement in each of those cases.  "I need you to tell me why you've left out details from each one."

"What details?" Joan hedges.

"Moriarty found you when Sonny Park kidnapped you, how?" Marcus' lips are pulled into a tight frown, and Joan can hear Sherlock shouting from downstairs that the food will be twenty minutes and who was at the door?  "You implied that it was by chance."

"She came to Sherlock; he took her offer for help.  I didn't mention it because at the time you took the witness statement I didn't know.  He told me afterwards," Joan shakes her head.  "And I don't like what you're implying Marcus."

Her shirt has slipped back from her shoulder and the twisted, raised white mark of Sonny Park's knife can clearly be seen amidst the freckles that have yet to fade on her skin.  Marcus stares at the scar, his lips drawing into a thin line of frustration and worry.

"I'm not implying anything, Joan.  All I see is that you are the common thread in all of these cases.  You and Moriarty.  The PKE Group, whoever the hell they are, they figured out that you're the one person who makes that woman act like a loose cannon.  So they keep pressing her buttons.  I want to use that to catch her and put her back in prison where she belongs."

A big part of Joan wants to throw her head back and laugh.  Moriarty has been in New York, under their noses, for over a year now.  Her lawyers are slowly unfreezing her assets, and her empire is rebuilding.  The NYPD are not interested at all in capturing Moriarty again.  "Is that what they really want?" she asks.

"The official line is that so long as she doesn't make herself known or a problem, they'll let her be.  Her escape wasn't publicized because of the Park case and Gregson says that the order to ignore her comes directly from the top."  Marcus shoves his hands in his pockets.  "She shot Camille Vincent, didn't she? She was the one who came to your rescue."

Joan closes her eyes, thinking of Moriarty's eyes going from the hard glare of a killer to warm and concerned over Joan's safety as Vincent's body slumped down onto the floor.  "She did."

"Why didn't you mention it in your statement?" Marcus rubs at the back of his head.  "There's no love lost between you two, and you know better than anyone what she's capable of.  We would have had proof!  We could have locked her up for good."

"I..."  Joan looks away, feeling ashamed.  "She would say that it wasn't sporting, to take a favor and return it with a double cross.  I suppose my not mentioning it was my way of saying thank you."

"I could arrest you for falsifying evidence," Marcus points out.  "I've more than enough proof."

Joan looks up at him sharply.  There's no way that Marcus would ever do that.  Not to either of them.  He understands the twisted games that they play better than most.

"But I won't, because yeah, I get it.  I'd've done the same thing, maybe.  Probably.  I don't know."

"Rock, meet hard place."

"Pretty much."  Marcus leans over and tucks the statements back into their respective files just as Sherlock pushes the door open.

"Bell!" He announces, bouncing on his toes and smiling just a little menacingly.  He must have been listening in.  "So lovely to see you outside of normal business hours."

"Holmes," Marcus says.

"We've just ordered dinner, are you staying?"

He shakes his head.  "I've got a date tonight," he replies.  "But thanks."

Joan's eyebrows shoot up and he smiles sheepishly at her.  "You don't know her," he adds as Sherlock's mouth opens to ask what no-doubt will be an impossibly prying question.  "I'll see you tomorrow."

He trails off towards the door and Joan pulls her phone from her pocket.  She has a badge for two new text messages now.  One is from Oren with a link to an article he'd apparently read on the train.  The other is from a blocked number.

Swallowing, Joan watches as Sherlock sees Marcus out and locks the door behind him.  Her thumbs move over the screen and she types her response.

_When and Where?_

-

Collins is hovering.

Jamie slides her thumb over her phone screen and tilts the phone away from him so that he cannot read her text.  Privately, she's delighted that she's gotten a response at all. She hadn't thought Watson would rise to the bait.  She cannot show her glee though, it would count as a weakness she doesn’t think she can have right now.

Westin had blindsided her.  She'd seen signs and had chosen to ignore them in her haste to fix a problem she hadn't known she'd had until Westin, she assumed, had thrown Joan Watson right into the PKE Group's crosshairs.  Jamie supposes that a better paycheque is just that, better pay.  They'd had a stroke of luck, and Collins had been able to liberate Westin's laptop from his apartment before police had showed up to look it over.

They'd spent the better part of an hour going over the contents of the laptop, Collins had managed to guess Westin's password on only the third try (his favorite footballer) and Jamie had not had to resort to her usual means of getting into computers that were locked up with her own security systems.  She had the override codes, naturally, but she didn't trust Westin to not have some sort of protection on his personal information now that he'd proven to be a traitor.

On the laptop there were a series of emails, and a receipt from an online photo printer.  Everything pointed to Westin being the man behind the threats made to Watson, which made Jamie's decision to plant similar photos from Westin's surveillance of Marie Montclair before they'd killed her all the easier to believe.  Now it was just a matter of waiting for the police to discover the emails and realize that the man they were looking for was already dead.

Jamie sits back and types out her reply, telling Watson to come back to the studio. The threat of her being shot is now largely dissipated, as Westin is dead, his death arranged for by Marc Tenimont.  Jamie's found evidence of that as well, now that she knows what to look for in Tenimont's carefully coded messages.

The cypher is still unsolved, and sits mocking on her workbench.  Jamie is perched on a stool, her legs crossed under her as she reads through Westin's files.  Her anger is growing, festering within her.  She cannot believe she'd been so stupid to have missed something so obvious.

Collins, too, is feeling her ire.  It's why he's hovering when he should go out, monitor the situation with Watson or with Tenimont.  He should be anywhere but here, flicking concerned glances at her every two and a half minutes.  Jamie's starting to get irritated, and she wants to threaten to shoot him to make him simply go away.

She wants to be alone in her failure.

"Watson is coming," she says, looking up from her phone and setting it down on her thigh.  "I want you out of the way."

"Someone's murdered Westin, mum," Collins replies, sticking out his lower lip obstinately and crossing his arms over his broad chest.  "I don't think you should be without protection right now."

"Mr. Collins." Jamie takes a deep breath, calming herself to the point where she will not falter and she will not say something she'll later regret.  "Who is to say that I cannot protect myself?  The only person who's coming here is Watson, and I don't think I need tell you that she poses no threat.  We need eyes on Tenimont.  I think the code is a summons, a meeting of the remaining members of the PKE Group could be taking place somewhere the city, and I would love to see this thing finished, wouldn’t you?"

"And the investigation?"

"Into Westin?"  Jamie tips her shoulders upwards into an affected shrug.  She wants to project some uncertainty because that is what Collins expects, but she knows better.  There's no reason to suspect that they're even looking at her or the rest of the organization at this point.  All the blame is squarely on Westin and while revenge cannot be Jamie's, she can at least revel in the posthumous besmirching of his name.  "If our man at the Medical Examiner's office's word is true, his murder will never be solved, and not too much effort shall be put into finding his killer.  He murdered an innocent girl, after all, and threatened one of their consultants."  
   
"But who killed Westin, then?" Collins wonders, half to himself.

"Tenimont, or someone within his organization.  Westin was playing both sides for quite some time."  Jamie's lip curls upwards and she feels a particularly strong urge to hurt something.  Her anger is not without merit, she knows this, but it is the unfounded feeling of it that she loathes.  There is no place to channel it, for most of it can only be directed at herself for her own stupidity for missing such an obvious double-cross over a year in the making.

She has to call her lawyers and make certain that Westin has not interfered with the slow and tedious process of unfreezing her assets.  She has to see to the situation with Tenimont and fast.

Jamie gets to her feet, her legs feeling unsteady and half-asleep, tingling with the sensation of movement after sitting still for so long.  "Contact the cleaners," she tells Collins, moving over towards the bed and pulling her suitcase out from under it.  "This is going to end tonight, one way or another.  I want this space empty and scrubbed by morning."

"That..." Collins starts, but draws back, nodding once. There is a finality about the way that he bends to pick up a discarded newspaper.  "Of course mum," he settles on, shifting on his feet, uncertain when Jamie knows that he would rather be resolute.  "Where are we going?"

"London," Jamie answers distractedly.  She cannot appear to be packing when Watson gets here, so this will have to wait, at least to some extent.  She moves to gather small items, items tucked into wardrobes and drawers and closets - things that Watson would not notice unless given the impetus to look.  "The usual place."

"And the painting?"

Jamie turns and stares at her meditation.  It's still not finished, but it's growing closer to completion with each passing day.  She bites the inside of her cheek, feeling a surge of emotions that she should not have and does not want pull within her.  Watson can never know how grave an effect she's had on Jamie, it simply would not do at all.  "Ship it to storage."

One way or another, this business with Watson will end tonight as well.

-

"This is a bad idea," Sherlock announces after Joan outlines the beginnings of her plan to him.  They're sitting at the kitchen table, half-eaten Indian food on plates before them.  Joan doesn't much feel like eating, Marcus' words fresh on her mind and the realization of all that she's inadvertently done resonating with her.  "She'll see it coming a mile away."

Joan shakes her head.  "I don't think she will."  Moriarty is blind and acts foolishly (or as foolishly as one such as Moriarty can act) where Joan is concerned.  They've seen evidence of this several times now, over the past year.  "She's got this blind spot, you know."  She gives Sherlock a pointed look and he looks down at his plate of lentils and picks up his fork once more.  "Sort of like you."

"I fear, Watson, that in becoming close to her, you've developed one as well.  You lack the objectivity to see it, because you're still caught up in it - in her."  Sherlock chews on his lentils thoughtfully and tilts his head back.  He's still not looking at her and Joan hates it, because refusal to acknowledge such another person when speaking to them is a childish trait of his that Joan hates on so many levels.  She does not want his admonishment if he cannot look her in the eye.  "And this mess is partially the result of that."

"Sam Westin would be dead regardless of my presence in Moriarty's life."

"Sam Westin is probably the reason why your presence in Moriarty's life has taken on meaning beyond your being the woman who beat her at her own game."  His tone is tense, slanted, and Joan doesn't like what he's implying.  She's worth more than that.

"I don't think you're giving Moriarty enough credit.  She is the manipulator, not Westin.  Westin was her henchman.  He was the one she sent to confront Park when there was a chance that he could be killed.  As it was, he got shot."  Joan shakes her head.  "Moriarty isn't about to let herself be manipulated by her own people.  No, Westin's death was purely of his own making - he played both sides, probably, and either Moriarty or the PKE Group had him killed for it."

"But you cannot deny that it was not the PKE Group that figured out my - and subsequently your - importance to Moriarty."

"No," Joan muses.  "That was probably Westin."

Sherlock makes an affirmative noise and goes back to his lentils.  He chews thoughtfully.  "It was probably during the Park investigation."

"Probably."

A skeptical eyebrow. "You're really going to do this."

"What choice do I have, Sherlock? I've made a terrible mistake and now I have to fix it."  Joan twists her spoon back down into curry that is now cold and sets it down once more.  She could nuke it back to warmth, but she's suddenly not hungry at all.

"Let her go," Sherlock answers.  "Let this fascination she has with you die and let your own attraction die as well."  His tone is kind, not mocking or jealous, but Joan cannot shake the fact that there is jealousy there.  "Let her solve this problem with the PKE Group and hope she leaves this city."

"I... I don't know if I can."

"That is the twisted web she weaves, Watson.  You would have been better off avoiding it all together.  She can be... rather striking, until you see the darker side of her nature."  He leans back in his chair, tipping it unwisely back on two legs.  Joan braces herself for the inevitable crash of his loss of balance.  "You try to hide it, Watson, but you're drawn to her for the same reason she is drawn to you.  You both like things you don't understand."

 _Puzzles and games,_ Joan thinks, _wasn’t that what she said to Sherlock? She saw games where he saw puzzles?_   People are easy for her.  She can see through the bullshit and the smokescreens effortlessly.  She isn't confused by actions that are logical or by people understanding why she does things. She isn't like them.

Her mother’s words echo in her ears and Joan bites her lip and looks down at the soggy, greasy mess of food on her plate.  Perhaps her mother was right.  She is drawn to the unknown, the broken and the unfixable.

Moriarty might actually be all three of those at once.  Joan is hesitant to call her broken though, a breaker of all around her perhaps, but not broken.  She's not plagued by angst and she's far too resolute in her actions for that.

Joan lets out a quiet breath of air. This is a mess.

"I won't succeed," Joan says quietly, her eyes half closed as she takes on what feels like the weight of the world.  It is not an easy burden.  "But if by some miracle I do, I won't stop seeing her.  Maybe if we'd gone before, we would have kept her entertained enough to stay put until her lawyers could have negotiated some of her secrets for an early release."

"That's a fairly naïve view of the situation."

"I know, but it's the one I want to believe, Sherlock.  Let me, just for a little while."  She looks down at her hands.  "If anything else, trying will make Marcus see that it was never wanted I wanted in the first place."

Sherlock says nothing for a long time, hands in his lap and his expression distant.  When he gets up to clear away his plate he nods once. "She won't hesitate to hurt you - to kill you - if it means saving herself."

"I know."

"Good luck then, Joan."

-

Watson arrives on with a cold blast of midnight air just as the clock tolls the witching hour.  It's all very poetic and Jamie's preoccupied with the imagery for a moment, standing before the canvas that she doesn't dare touch.  Collins and the cleaners are set to move it tonight - fresh paint will only be a hindrance and she'd hate to have to make corrections.  As it is, the paint won't be dry for years.

The buzzer at the door outside rings and it is all that Jamie can do to not reach for the gun that's discarded beside Westin's computer and carry it with her to the door.  An ambush would not be out of the question, even if she is largely safe from the NYPD due to certain bits of information she's come across in her time here since her departure from Newgate and her careful application of her knowledge of these details.  She presses the button that will allow the exterior door to open into the building’s lobby and slips outside, locking her own door behind her. 

Jamie takes the stairs, relishing the feeling if _movement_ after being static for so long.  Watson is standing with her hands plunged into her cropped jacket pockets.  She’s out of her normal boots, Jamie notices.  She draws level to Watson and stands before her, eyeing the practical dark jeans and comfortable jumper that she is wearing. She looks at ease, and Jamie does not like the comfortable way that Watson’s hands are tucked into her pockets and how her expression is mild, placating even. 

She should be terrified.

“I’m sorry about Sam Westin,” she says in lieu of a greeting. 

Jamie regards her for a moment more, eyes unblinking and her face a perfect mask of blankness.  “Don’t be.  He was a traitor.”

Watson’s eyes narrow, but she says nothing.  Jamie thinks that it’s a prudent move, for the tension that exists between them could shatter glass if it is given half a chance.  As much as she likes Watson, as much she enjoys their games, this is different, because once this is done – there could be no more games.

“You’re thinking of having the NYPD arrest me,” Jamie adds in an almost conversational tone, crossing over to the lift and jabbing the button with her thumb.  She lets her jacket ride up, as she raises her arm to brush a lock of hair out of her eyes.  She wants Watson to see that she’s unarmed. 

"Whether they arrest you or not is their call, but you are a wanted criminal, Jamie."

The lift door chimes as it opens and Jamie turns to glance at Watson over her shoulder.  "You'll find that I am a great many things, Joan Watson, should you bother to look."  The meaning of her words - the idle threat that is expected and the challenge to Watson's worldview - fall empty into the lobby as Watson scoots into the lift after her.

They ride up in silence, Jamie finds herself preoccupied with the implications of Watson's presence here.  She'd wanted the game, yes; but the cost of it is troubling.  What, exactly, does Watson want?  And does it matter if she gets it?

Watson shifts beside her and it feels like someone has slammed their fist into Jamie's stomach, choking the air from her gut and making her seize up.  She keeps herself steady, her breathing slow and even.  She cannot show weakness, not to Watson, not ever to Watson.

What Watson, what Joan, wants does matter and Jamie cannot understand how or why it has come to mean anything to Jamie at all.  There's an inherent weakness in Watson that she can never escape - she's a woman in this man's world.  Same as Jamie.

They are the same in that regard.

Jamie flicks her eyes over to see Watson staring impassively ahead, her attention focused on the lift doors.  Jamie wants to say something, wants to make a supposition and dissect the hypothesis until she can disprove her traitorous heart.

The lift chimes again and the doors roll open in an uneven hiccup of movement.  Watson steps forward and Jamie retrieves her keys and follows, hitting the button to send the elevator back to the ground floor.

"Did you ever solve that cypher?" Watson asks.

Perhaps this is her peace offering, even if it comes in the face of another failure.  Jamie wants to lie and say that she has, but she knows that Watson will see straight through it.  Perhaps admission that despite all of her bravado she is human will do her well, but humility and humanity have never been per strongest suits.  Jamie leans forward to unlock her door.  "No," she says curtly.  "My information comes from other sources."

The door swings open, Jamie's keys still hanging in the lock.  Neither of them makes a move to step into the space.  This has to be said before they step into Jamie's sanctum, it appears.

"I could send it to Sherlock."

"I doubt he could solve it, otherwise I would have forwa--"

Watson folds her arms over her chest, chin jutting out in defiance of Jamie's words. "Please, your vanity would never allow you to admit that you needed help."

Sucking in a deep breath of air, Jamie manages to keep herself from looking murderously at Watson.  She's done that enough, recently, and Watson has done nothing but point out what Jamie is already thinking.

"I have tried every tactic that he would, and my knowledge of mathematics is far superior to his."

"How do you now that?" Watson is curious, and Jamie's given away too much.  "Sherlock's pretty good with math."

A rueful smile drifts across Jamie's face and she turns, stepping into the small apartment.  "Sherlock understands maths, yes, but surely you've grown curious by now, Watson.  It isn't as though my information is particularly hard to locate now that you have my name."

Watson follows her inside and pushes the door shut behind her, leaning against the door, as far from the space that Jamie has occupied these past few months.  She doesn't want to be here, Jamie realizes, but she's here anyway.  Someone has said something or done something - someone's poked a hole in her perfect narrative of this game between them.

"Sherlock may have mentioned something about some published essays on theoretical mathematics when we had a case back last year involving -"

"P vs. NP, yes," Jamie says with a flourish, waving one hand in the air and spinning on her heel.  She heads into the studio, knowing that Watson will follow her deeper in without question.  It's what she wants, because it is only with Watson that this can be resolved.  "I must confess I was rather put out that he did not contact me for assistance on the case."

"It was straight murder in the end."

"All the more reason to contact me," Jamie sighs, perhaps a bit too dramatically.  "I was bored out of my mind in Newgate at the time.  A problem like P v. NP would have kept me busy for _weeks_."

A small smile drifts across Watson's face.  "Maybe then you would not have broken out of prison in the first place."

Something twists at the pit of Jamie's stomach and she turns to stare at Watson.  "I left Newgate because you and Sonny Park were on a collision course.  I saw the signs coming and I tried to warn you both, but I was too late."  She steps forward, one step, two steps, three steps.  She's standing right before Watson, her fingers tracing a revenant line up Watson's arm.  Through two or three layers of fabric, the scar cannot be felt, but it is there.  Jamie hates that it is there.   "I should have killed him, ended this before it started.  Is that why you still struggle, Joan?"

There is a wild look in Watson's eyes, like a trapped animal.  Jamie has seen that look many times - shooting squirrels and rabbits in the countryside as a child.  Imagining butchering them in creative ways, honing her techniques that she’d later use, it had become an obsession for Jamie.  Watson's breath is coming in short, shallow pants.  She does not want to talk about this, but Jamie is certain that this is the way to fix this one part of Watson that she'd had no apart in breaking.

"Don't say things like that."

"Like what?"

"That you should've killed him.  You didn't, and that... that was good."  Watson runs a hand through her hair, but she does not shrug away from Jamie's fingers.  Her gaze is intense, bright and defiant.  She's not playing the game the way that she's supposed to and she knows it. "You gave those girls' families justice."

"I did not give you justice."

"You are not my avenging angel."  Watson purses her lips, evidently thinking better of what she had been about to say after that statement.  "Sam Westin told Nigel Peddicort, I'm guessing, of your interest in me, and the PKE Group ran with it."

Well, well, Joan Watson.  Jamie is almost impressed that she's seen though the smokescreens to the truth of the matter.

"Westin was playing both sides, to what end I'm not sure even you know, but he's dead now and I know that you did not kill him."

"How?"

Watson's fingers come up to rest on Jamie's cheek.  Jamie knows that she is supposed to feel something from the gesture, but all she feels is the heat of the touch and a want that bursts within her.  Watson is showing that she's more than equipped to play the game, and the play it with her own rules.  But is this her next move?  Is something like this even wise?

Joan Watson doesn't take needless risks, but the way that her fingers feel on Jamie's skin lingers like an invitation.

"You would never be so sloppy."

Afterwards, Jamie is not sure who leaned in first.  Watson seems to bob and Jamie tilts her head to the side to concede Watson's point.  Her lips brush against Watson's and the kiss that had been coming feels like drowning. A hollow, rushing sound fills her ears and Jamie lets her fingers pull from Watson's arm to tangle in her hair.

This is not how it is supposed to happen.  It has always been a possibility. Sherlock has called her a seductress and the title is not without merit, but it is also a fallacy.  She’d learned a long time ago that sex complicated things unnecessarily, no matter how essential it was to continued high brain function.  This, though, this had not been a part of the plan.  Jamie’s fingers do not catch on Watson’s hair, but rather slide through it, memorizing the texture and the feel.  The hair is the last part of Watson that she will paint, and it is the part Jamie is sure that will prove the most challenging.

She is caught up, distracted by Watson’s tongue in her mouth and the way her breath leaves her lungs when Watson pushes her up against the wall, one knee jamming in between Jamie’s legs and staying there, firm and adding to the mind-numbing distraction that Jamie cannot pull away from.  Her mind cannot process beyond wanting Watson’s jacket and jumper _off_ and wanting to touch her, to feel her skin because this is probably the last night that they will see each other for a very long time. 

Watson’s fingers make quick work of Jamie’s shirt and bra, throwing them aside and staring in on the fastener of her pants.  It’s a clasp, not a button, and Watson won’t break the kiss long enough to look down and actually undo it.  Jamie pulls away, her head hitting the wall and a sharp crack of pain coursing through her.  It feels good, it is good, and Jamie wants to feel it again.  She opens her eyes, regarding Watson’s across the short space between them.  Their breath is ragged, coming in short little breaths of air and when Jamie moves to step away, into the main room of the studio, towards the bed shoved into the corner, Watson lets out a low groan at the back of her throat that sends heat pooling between Jamie’s legs and setting at the base of her spine. 

Jamie manages there rest of Watson’s clothing on the way there, but she’s still in jeans that are too tight to come off easily without them both falling over and fucking on the cold floor.  Jamie wants the warmth, the blankets.  She wants to prove to Watson that this isn’t the mistake Watson is so convinced that it is.  She wants to have Watson to prove that she can.  To have her when Sherlock has not.

This is just another play in the game, and if Jamie does it right, it will have Watson back another, once this mess with Tenimont is sorted.

She pushes Watson onto the bed and tugs on the offending jeans until they’re gone, tossing them aside.  Watson half rises off the bed, sitting up and watching as Jamie slowly lowers herself onto the floor in the space between Watson’s knees.  The floorboards are hard and cold, but Jamie doesn’t think that this will take long. 

“Jamie,” Watson half groans when Jamie leans forward and presses a kiss to the inside of Watson’s thigh.  Jamie lingers, teeth scraping against skin.  Watson’s fingers curl into her hair and her thighs tremble as Jamie leaves first one mark, and then another.  Small bite marks that will remind Watson of this for days to come.  She leans up, tilting herself on already aching knees, and presses a kiss to the juncture of Watson’s thigh and hip.  Her tongue flicks out, finds home, and the guttural “ _Jesus…”_ above her is enough to make Jamie’s lips quirk upwards into a sly smile.

She stays there, Watson’s fingers fisted in her hair until she’s sure that Watson can take no more.  It’s then that she pulls away and Watson’s hips are still undulating, wanting Jamie to finish.  Jamie’s knees scream in protest as they both fall into the bed, and her fingers find home again, pushing into Watson, the heel of her palm grinding where her lips had been, suckling like a newborn babe.  Jamie bites into Watson’s neck, feeling Watson’s nails rake down her back.  She will see Watson come undone, she will have her.  She must.

(She’s always wanted too much and if this one act can chase the memory of Sonny Park from Watson’s memory then it is worth it a thousand times over.)

Jamie tastes blood in her mouth as Watson comes undone beneath her. She’s bitten Watson, it seems, and her tongue laves on the spot, her fingers still pushing into Watson.  She feels Watson shaking, and she’s inexplicably proud of herself for making Watson this far gone.  To watch Saint Joan Watson fall to such basic needs is enough to make Jamie feel her own need for release acutely.

And Watson does not tire.  She takes in Jamie through wide, pleasure-dark eyes, and she reaches out, her lips colliding with Jamie’s once more.  There is intent in this kiss, and fear.  Jamie drinks in the fear, feeling it, reveling in it.  Enjoying how it tastes like blood on her tongue. 

Somewhere in the shuffle she’s lost her trousers, and Watson has her laid bare and wanting.  It’s like Sherlock, Watson understands her.  Understand what she wants out of such a coupling and she gives it to her without prompting.  Something clicks in Jamie as she sucks on the mark she’d made on Watson’s neck, teeth sinking into soft skin and her quaking with her own release.  Watson is like them.  Watson is just like them and it makes this all the easier.

Corrupting someone like herself has never been a problem, but the guilty feeling that comes with it is not something that Jamie expects.  She basks in it, for it is an alien feeling to her.  She is unused to such things. Guilt is not a good emotion to have in her line of work, and she’s long-since stripped her moral compass of anything that resembles humanity. 

"We should not have done that," Jamie says afterwards.  She bends down to fish her underwear out from the tangle of clothes and bed sheets.  She pulls them on and feels them shift, uncomfortable and slightly damp against her.  She does not have a clean pair to put on, though, they're packed up in the suitcase that she cannot open for fear of tipping her hand entirely to Watson.  Watson is smart enough to have figured it out, but as she tugs her shirt and bra back down, Jamie cannot help but hope that Watson hasn't put it all together yet.  "It wasted valuable time."

"Time for what."

"I told you, Watson, I know what Tenimont is planning and we must act quickly.  The meeting is at five."

"This afternoon? Jamie, we could sleep." Jamie has learned through careful observation that there is very little that is more important to Watson than sleep. She's hypnotized that it is because of medical school and a long residency followed by a longer fellowship; but there's something else.  A lingering sort of thing.  A childhood trauma perhaps, maybe even night terrors.

Jamie can relate to that.

"This morning.  Two hours from now.  They're all still on Paris time - well, except Tenimont, but he's really buggered things so he's in no position to argue."  Jamie pulls her shirt over her head and straightens to her feet.  "We have an errand to run before we go there."

Watson tugs on her jeans and does up the fly, hair sex mussed and lips still swollen.  There's a reddening mark on her neck, a bruise from where Jamie bit her.  They should not have done it, it makes everything so much more complicated.

"An errand?" Watson's voice sounds tentative, but her eyes have this resolute gleam that Jamie finds admirable.

"I think it's time you see why it is that your friends at the NYPD are powerless to keep me behind prison walls,"  Jamie crosses the room to her workbench and collects the dossier that she'd prepared before Watson had arrived.  Inside are far more secrets than she's willing to give up, but will buy her the freedom she desires to continue her enterprise, and it will buy her safe passage out of the city once this is done.

She gathers her gun and a spare clip, checking to make sure that the magazine is full before she tucks it into the waistband of her pants.  Watson is staring at her, hands mid-way through zipping up her jacket, her expression perfectly blank.  "You mean to murder the rest of them."

"They've threatened you Watson, and they don't seem particularly keen on stopping, no matter how many of them I kill. A group like that is a hydra.  It isn't until all the heads are gone that you can truly feel safe."

Watson zips her jacket up the rest of the way and her expression shifts to looking slightly guilty.  "Marcus - Detective Bell - he figured out that you were the one who'd shot Camille Vincent. It's only a matter of time before he implicates you in Marie Montclair's murder as well.  You'll never be safe here again, Jamie."

"Who is to say that I plan on killing the rest of the PKE Group?  I certainly never said that."  Jamie smiles wickedly at Watson, who just barely appears to be supressing the urge to either roll her eyes or bolt.  Despite her casual irritation and Jamie being glib, Jamie can see that same scared animal look in her eyes, nervous and flighty.  She wants Watson worried, scared even.  It's only then that Jamie can have the upper hand in this, the final play of the game.

She steps forward, crossing into Watson's personal space.  Her smile is cruel now, because this is what she wants.  She wants to understand Watson, yes, but she thinks she does now.  They understand each other, for Watson is making no move to stop her.  Jamie presses a kiss to the mark on Watson's neck, the one she made with teeth and tongue and the satisfaction that Sherlock will see that mark and he will know.  He will know and finally Jamie will have succeeded in hurting him the way she's always dreamed of doing.  The breathy noise that Watson makes as she draws her nails harsh and firm across Jamie's back is an added bonus. One that Jamie revels in.

"Besides, darling, what evil could I possibly commit with you there to keep me in line?"

-

Joan's hands are shaking and she's having trouble hiding it.  She is disgusted with herself on so many levels that she isn't sure she can even begin to explain why she'd done it, why she'd let it happen. The worst part is that she's wanted it and has wanted it for some time.  The intrigue, the desperation, the force of that coupling had been enough to draw them together and to bind them.  They were stuck now.

She's going to be sick.

Moriarty is driving - which is bizarre - them to some unknown destination. She turns the car down a quiet, residential street in a part of the city that Joan rarely frequents.  It's three thirty in the morning and they both smell like sex and sin.  The car is older, non-descript and makes a rattling sound when they turn left that tells Joan that there's something up with the wheel bearing.  Alfredo, she thinks ruefully, would be proud of her for figuring it out.

"Where is your man?" Joan asks, hands clenched in her pockets.  It's the only place she can think if putting them where Moriarty won't notice that they're shaking. She can't let Moriarty see how much this is affecting her.  She'd been stupid, so completely and utterly stupid.  What the hell was she thinking?

She was thinking with her dick, Emily's voice echoes in her head.  Joan can barely suppress a hysterical giggle at the absurdity of the thought.

"Mr. Collins is attending to another matter relating to the mess that Mr. Westin's death has made for me."  Moriarty says, sifting the car into reverse and parking effortlessly in a spot that Joan would have sworn was too small for the car.  "You don't have to come in," she adds, one hand splayed out across the back of the headrest, her face very close to Joan's.

And Joan cannot help herself, leaning forward, kissing her like the fool that she is.  Sherlock is right, She is blind to this woman.  So blind that she's sure if she blinks even once she'll miss Moriarty sliding a knife neatly between her ribs.  Don't blink, she reminds herself.

"This is a mistake." Moriarty's voice is a quiet whisper.

"I know, God, I know."

Moriarty bites her lip.  Joan looks away.  The dossier feels like it weighs a hundred pounds, sitting in Joan's lap.  "I would have you again."  Moriarty shakes her head.  "You are fascinating, Joan Watson.  I don't think I shall ever tire of trying to understand you."

"Who's to say that you won't grow bored of me, like you did Sherlock?"

"Those circumstances were very different."

They both know that they were not.

"You broke him."  Joan sucks in a deep breath of air, her fingers curling around the dossier.  "You'll break me."

And in that moment Joan sees something she'd never thought she'd see: A flicker of self-doubt drifts across Moriarty's face.  Joan's breath catches in her throat and Moriarty looks away.  "Provided you don't break me first."

She's out of the car before Joan can respond, coming around to open the door for Joan like a gentleman - or perhaps a chauffeur.  She takes the folder from Joan and climbs the steps slowly, indicating that Joan should hang back with a single, placating hand.

Moriarty rings the doorbell and steps back, one hand behind her back, resting loosely on her gun.  A light flicks on inside, and a man that Joan recognizes from his photo in Captain's Gregson's office opens the door. He’s older, mid-sixties at least, but rail-thin and sharp.  His eyes dart to Joan before settling back on Moriarty.

"You," he says, and his mustache quivers in fear.

"Me." Moriarty smiles prettily, and holds out the leather folder like a peace offering.  "I think it time we end our uneasy alliance, Commissioner.  These are the original negatives of your dalliance with young Officer Sanderson."

Joan's eyes widen, because Sanderson is a uniformed cop, fresh out of the academy.  He works in the Eleventh Precinct and Joan would never, not in a million years, have guessed that he was gay.  The commissioner she's had thoughts about.  Mrs. Hudson, Sherlock and Joan had spent an evening speculating about it not too long ago after there had been hints at a scandal.  Nothing had come of it - and Joan wondered if this was the reason why.

The commissioner takes the folder with some trepidation and opens it. "How do I know you haven't kept copies?"

"What good are copies, Commissioner, in this age of digital manipulation?  Film is far safer, in my experience.  It's a lot harder to edit negatives."

"What do you want?"  He asks as he closes the folder.  "I cannot keep telling the city to turn a blind eye to your presence here forever."

Moriarty leans forward and whispers something so low that Joan, from half-way down the steps, cannot hear what she is saying.  The man's eyes narrow, and then his expression brightens considerably.

"You would hand me the largest meth producer in the city as a parting gift?"

"Call it a public service," Moriarty replies with a toothy smile that does not reach her eyes at all.  "They will call the police," she adds.  "And the police will not come until they are told to come."

"And how will I know when that is?"

"Doctor Watson here will tell you."

Joan stares.  She will do no such thing and Moriarty knows that.  A breath of icy wind passes between them, as cold as Moriarty's eyes as they bore into Joan.  It is better, she knows, to just nod her head and allow herself to become Moriarty's pawn in this game.

There are wider implications here and Joan isn't seeing them. She strains to follow the leaps of logic that Moriarty's brain is making, but she's tired and Moriarty has made sure that she's functioning at a lower capacity, wanting to sleep off orgasm and the alarming force of their coming together.

She hedges, because it's her best option without revealing to this man who could very easily have her arrested that she has no idea what Moriarty's planning.  "I will?"

Moriarty’s lip curls into a self-satisfied smile.  “You will.  You were going to call them anyway, after all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic keeps spawning extra parts, send help. The P v. NP thing is from _Solve for X_ and although this fic is technically ignoring all of season two, I couldn't ignore that episode. It was so perfect. The Moriarty y maths thing comes from the original Holmes canon.


	5. the heart (is hard to translate)

They drive to Jersey City in silence.  Joan itches to lean forward and put on the radio, anything to drown out the suffocating white noise of tires on a largely empty city street and then expressway and bridge. Everything that is going unsaid is choking her. She has a million questions, a million questions she cannot ask and doesn't want the answers to.  If she has the answers then this grows closer to a reality that she has to accept, and as much as she wants it, she knows she cannot do that.

Perhaps they are both fools for thinking that this could ever have a chance at working, perhaps it was never meant to work.  Joan doesn't trust Moriarty at all, and she's sure that Moriarty sees her plan coming. She's set herself up to fall, and that idea is confusing because her self-preservation instinct is usually better than how she's been acting.

Her therapist would blame this on the trauma that she hasn't gotten over yet - but Joan thinks this is more like an addiction.  She's become very focused on understanding the subtle nuances of this ... whatever between herself and Moriarty.  Until she peels back the layers of how this works, she doesn't think she can let it go.

No matter how much her better angels are screaming at her to run as far away as she can possibly get.

"Why did you think I was going to call the police?" The question falls unbidden from her lips, and it's too late for her to choke it down like she has all the others.  She fixes Moriarty with an expectant stare, defiant.  Joan is sure that Moriarty had never expected her to ask.

Moriarty leans over and jabs at the radio, it's preset to some Top 40 channel, but they're playing oldies this late.  Joan hears the familiar beats and recognizes the song almost instantly, a standard from her medical school days.  The delaying tactic puzzles Joan, and she stares down at the radio and the legend reading '96.5' for a long time before she glances over at Moriarty, eyes on the road, just as the hook starts.

"Jamie?" She tries again, hating how it sounds almost tender.  Whatever exists between them isn't tender, that's just another lie.

_Don't go chasing waterfalls..._ The song is almost fitting.

"When I started this," Moriarty bites back a laugh, leaving only a harsh sound from the back of her throat.  "I wanted to see you fall. I wanted to take your fascinating brain and put it through its paces to find its limits. I wanted to understand why I couldn't move past what you did to me."  She turns then, and her eyes are shining in the streetlights above.  They're like the stormy seas, and Joan cannot read them.  "You're my downfall, Joan, you took what was supposed to be my greatest triumph and you destroyed it with one simple and inconsequential action."

"I saw that, despite everything, you still cared for Sherlock.  Why else would you show up to rescue him from your rogue goon?"  Joan sighs and sits back in her chair.  "What would you have done, had he not gone after Sherlock?"

"I would have taken more time to observe you."  Moriarty signals and exits the expressway.  "And I would have never insulted you as I did."  They come to a stop at a light and Moriarty turns to flash a small, almost self-deprecating smile in Joan's direction.  "You must forgive me for that, Joan, I should have never underestimated you."

"Humility doesn't suit you."  It is a slight that Joan cannot forgive, for it is a lifetime in the making and Joan has never been one to feed into stereotypes. Moriarty relies on stereotypes, on racism and misogyny.  It is what makes her so good at what she does, and it is why Joan will never allow herself to fall completely into this web that she's skirting the edges of.

She is not the fly, and she will not come quietly into the spider's chamber.

"No, I don't think it does."  Moriarty  turns her attention back to the road.  She sucks in a quiet breath of air, the radio switches to a promotion for the morning show, Joan leans forward to punch it off.  "Leave it."  Joan sinks back into her seat, arms folded across her chest, and pretends that Waterfalls isn't stuck in her head.

"You didn't answer my question."

"About the police?"

"Yes."

The clock on the dashboard is illuminated to read that it is nearly five o'clock in the morning and Joan doesn't feel tired.  She's afraid of what Moriarty will say, a pronouncement of the murders that she and Sherlock are so certain that she's about to commit.

Moriarty swings into a parking space at the back of T-MIT's labs and blends in almost effortlessly with the few cars that dot the parking lot.  Joan moves to get out of the car, but she feels the warm weight of Moriarty's hand on her knee.  "Do not attempt to stop what is about to happen, I'd hate to have to incapacitate you."

Her breath leaves her body and Moriarty smiles cruelly at her, the fingers that are curled around Joan's thigh brushing against bite marks and bruises, hidden by denim but still so sensitive.  The reminder of what they've done brings a shameful flush to Joan's cheeks and she wishes she was anywhere else but here.  This is a terrible idea.

Moriarty had said that Joan could break her.  Joan doesn't think that's possible.  Moriarty could kill her and feel only the remorse of a lost playing, and she'd do it again and again, if it meant getting what she wants.

"You're no different than him," Joan says, thinking of another person who'd reveled in the power he'd held over her.  "Than Park."

"I am nothing like Park.  I do not play with my food."

"You've threatened me, same as him.  Lording your superior intellect over me, offering false remorse for something you feel no regret for."  Joan runs a hand through her hair, and catches herself wondering if maybe she shouldn't touch her hair - she doesn't want to leave evidence she's been here in case someone things to look.  "You don't feel bad that you insulted me then, that you demeaned me and belittled my relationship with Sherlock; you don't feel even the slightest guilt that you've just told me that you'd hurt me if I got in your way.  That's..."  Joan looks down at her hands, they're still shaking and she doesn't bother to hide it now.  Let her see what she's done, she knows as well as Joan does that surgeons have the steadiest hands.  "I can't do this, Jamie.  No matter how much I may want to, I can't do this, not like this."

"Are you going to walk away then, Joan?"  Moriarty removes the keys from the ignition and R.E.M. and their man on the moon fades away into late autumn silence.  She holds the keys out to Joan.  "Take them if you must, leave this place and call the police in forty-five minutes.  Do this for me now and you will never see me again."

And despite everything in her screaming that this is the best option, Joan cannot let Moriarty walk away from this.  Joan cannot willingly let her walk into that place to commit murder, murder that is done for Joan's benefit more than anyone else's, but a murder none the less.  That is not what she wants, and it shouldn't be what Moriarty wants either. "Jamie..." she starts.

"I came to the conclusion earlier tonight that it was easier to fuck you than it was to attempt to understand you, Watson," Moriarty says in a business-like tone, and Joan fees the words slowly start to cut into the thick skin she's developed throughout her life.  She's never been perfect, she has her faults, and each word feels like she's being filleted by a thousand knives.  "You should never have come, you knew the outcome of this evening, and yet you did anyway.  I'd like to say it was enjoyable for you, but I find myself no closer to understanding why you continue this interaction with me."  She tilts her head to one side, keys still held out in her palm.  "Unless you're caught up in the same struggle, and cannot let it go until you understand."

"This isn't healthy."

"Very little that is enjoyable in this life is."  Moriarty leans in her eyes catch the light and there is no life in them at all.  Her teeth feel vicious against Joan's lips as they crush together and Joan wants, oh god, Joan wants to just let this happen.  She knows that she has to be resolute, for Moriarty will see any weakness and exploit it. "And yet I would have you again, Watson, you are exquisite."  Moriarty is breathless when she speaks, her lips swollen red and her eyes still dead.  There is nothing, no feeling, a perfect mask.  She's presenting what she thinks Joan wants to see to scare her away.

Somewhere underneath that bravado and that carefully constructed mask, there must be some feeling, some ounce of humanity.  Joan's seen glimpses of it, but it is not a lingering thing. All the humanity in this woman is long-dead.  Moriarty might be broken after all, just not in the way that Joan had initially thought.  The idea scares her, but it settles her on some level, makes Joan more determined than ever to see this through.

"I'm going in with you."  She reaches out and takes the keys from Moriarty, tucking them into her pocket.  Her jaw is set in a resolute line as she meets Moriarty's gaze evenly.  She won't say anything else.

**the heart (is hard to translate)**

It's strange to do this with two people, but Jamie has to admit that she is impressed by the speed at which Watson dismantles the lock on the back door after one expertly thrown rock takes out the security camera.  She shifts the pack on her back and allows the empty parking lot a cursory glance.

Jamie feels brittle.  She'd tried everything she could think of to get Watson to leave.  She doesn't think she can pull the trigger in front of Watson, and it is what needs to be done to ensure her safety.  Now a single look from Watson could break her, crush her soul and destroy all that this has become.  The culmination, the destruction of this menace to the city, her love letter to Joan Watson told in the bodies of men who had dared wish for her death.

It is a medium that Jamie knows Watson will not appreciate.

Yet they have ignored her one rule for the city.  They have ignored the full force of Moriarty, thinking her weak for accepting defeat at the hands of so small a foe.  They do not know, they could never know, and now they seek to deny Jamie of Joan Watson.  Such an outcome is never acceptable.

They've broken her rule and they will play the price in blood.

"You're faster than Sherlock," she says when Watson gets to her feet and pulls the door open with one gloved hand.  She's careful, Jamie likes that, no unnecessary risks. She'd come prepared with her preferred picks - a different set than the one Jamie had borrowed from her all those months ago - gloves and a deadly accuracy with a thrown rock.  Jamie's sure, if she were to hand Watson her gun, that Watson would be able to shoot it and her aim would be true.

But that would require relinquishing the upper hand and Jamie is never one to surrender her weapon without a fight.

Watson tucks her picks away into her pocket and Jamie catches herself questioning why Watson has made this journey.  It is strange to find herself wondering about the motivations of another. Jamie knows that Watson has no interest in Jamie's work - or in the inevitable conclusion to this evening, and yet she is here.  She is helping.

Jamie's lips curl into a small, self-deprecating smile.  Watson is supervising and she's pushing Jamie to the point where she feels like the barest breath of wind will shatter her.

"I know," Watson smiles almost fondly as she speaks.  It is strange for a mention of Sherlock to go without that sad, hurt look in Watson's eyes, and it sets Jamie's teeth on edge.  The other foot that will drop will be heavy then.  Heavy and painful. "It makes him mad."

Jamie imagines that it would, for Sherlock does not like being bested.  Neither does Jamie, for that matter.  Contemplating Watson, knowing all the failure that has haunted her life, Jamie cannot wonder if Watson does not like being bested very much either.

She's taken something from Watson, something that she can never give back.  She's stolen it away and locked the memory of it deep within herself, drowning it in a well of her own guilt and the strangely human feeling that comes over her when she looks at Watson.

It was so stupid, so impossibly stupid.  Jamie doesn't allow herself indulgence for a reason.  She gets caught up in them, and they twist around her and linger, choking the life out of her.  Sherlock had done that, Watson could easily do it as well.

Perhaps Westin had been right. Perhaps Joan Watson is the one person in this city - maybe in this whole world - that will always make Jamie act rashly.  There is one other, but that is a secret so buried that it can never see the light of day.  It would put the blood of the only truly innocent soul that Jamie knows on her hands, should it ever come to light.  How Westin had seen the truth of that matter is a mystery that Jamie will probably never have an answer to.

They're standing in the alcove to a large, industrial laboratory.  In the corner is a decontamination shower that looks like it hasn't been touched in years and an emergency eye rinse station.  There's a dusty drain at the center of the floor that Jamie skirts around, following Watson's gaze as they peer through the door and take in the laboratory beyond. Jamie's surveying the room, taking note of the escape routes and ever-watching security cameras.  Her hand shoots out, grabbing Watson before she's caught through the window by a camera's line of sight.  "Security camera."  Jamie offers by way of explanation, but they're so close that any other words die in Jamie's throat.

She could get drunk on this feeling of closeness.

Watson cannot linger in her life, she's a distraction, a hazard, the trump card to which Jamie has no defense.  She'll topple the entirety of Jamie's organization if Jamie allows her to get too close or even to linger for more than a passing moment.

Here though, in this space between them, the quiet overtakes Jamie and all she can feel is the heat rising off Watson.  It warms her skin and casts shining rays of summer sunlight through the darkness of the black soul she's cultivated with nearly a decade and a half in this business.  She is too close to Watson, and she wants to draw in closer, to taste the heat of Watson on her tongue before she plummets, defeated, her wings melted, to the ground.   "Watson... Joan, I..."

How dare she draw Jamie's humanity out into the light from where it's sat in shadow so long that Jamie isn't entirely sure that it still exists as it once had?  How dare she make Jamie feel like this?

Anger rises up at the back of Jamie's throat and her hand flies behind her back, touching the smooth surface of her gun's grip.  She could kill Watson, end this right now.

(She could never.)

"This is not the time or the place, Jamie." Watson touches Jamie's face and her fingers are almost gentle, but her eyes look sad under the glow of the red light from the exit sign overhead.  Jamie's head tilts, and later she will swear it does it of its own accord, into the touch. She's screaming herself raw, her voice hoarse at the force of how much this cannot happen.  She cannot do this, she will not do this.  She is not a pawn to such petty things as emotions.

It is all that she can do to pull herself from this chasm that's opened up in her mind.  Jamie steels herself, resolves to lie and lie again until she believes it to be the truth.

She cannot care for Watson, because she is not capable of such a thing.  She is more highly evolved, she can see through this for what it is.  Watson wants her back in jail, and Jamie will be damned if she's ever going to be caught again.

She cannot allow herself to feel anything but the sting of that coming betrayal.

Watson steps into the laboratory, keeping to the edge of the wall.  It looks fairly normal, long lines of work benches, computer terminals; it is the usual fare for a business like Marc Tenimont's.  There are signs though, that this is not quite as it seems.  Scrape marks on the floor where space has been cleared and then hastily put back, large ventilation shafts that should not be there - for this is only a research facility.  Drums of chemicals that have no place in a lab like this, but look freshly arrived and heavily used sit in one corner, it strikes Jamie as odd. Most of T-MIT's actual drugs are manufactured in Mexico, and the FDA is here.  Such a presence would surely go noticed by the inspectors.

"How are you so certain that they have the drugs here?" Watson asks.

Jamie focuses, because if she is concentrating on the job, she can avoid the complications that arise from this continued liaison with Watson.  She stares around at the room, and sees nothing that could indicate where such a drug would be hidden.  "This is the facility where they are produced, after hours and at the weekend, more than likely.  Martin Haufman's help with my virus enabled me to take a closer look at their files, but without physical examination of the evidence, I cannot make that assumption." She moves through the room, pulling a stool away from a workbench and climbing up onto it, using a multi-tool to cut the cable to the nearest camera.  It will alert the security guards on the other side of the building, and they will come.  Jamie tugs her gun out and makes sure that there is a bullet in the chamber of the gun.  She lets it fall, held loosely between her fingers.

Let them come.

"I promised the commissioner the largest producer of methamphetamines in the city, and I intend to deliver."  Jamie stares around at the space before her and it hits her, she twists down from the stool, landing in a crouch that has Watson's eyebrows raised.  Jamie flashes her a small smile, but it doens't feel real, and turns her attention back to the lab floor.

It doesn't take long to find what she's looking for, once she figures out the most logical placement of something highly illegal.  She thinks that she knows how T-MIT can get away with having the chemicals here, if she recalls the research that Collins had done into Tenimont's company over the summer.  They were looking at the medical and commercial applications of a drug with similar compounds to meth, which would explain the drums of chemicals that should have had no place in such a facility.

She stoops down and lets out a triumphant little 'ha' at the back of her throat. A large white plastic barrel marked 'hazardous waste' with the symbols typical for such a facility affixed on its side out from where it is tucked beneath a workbench.  There's a chute attached to the top, where waste can go in but not come out.  Jamie can see their methods even now.  How they've managed with the FDA crawling over this place is beyond her.

"You're not... going to open that are you?"  Watson asks, as Jamie bends and disengages the chute's locking mechanism and moves it out from underneath the workbench.  Four minutes until the guards arrive.

"They'll be in there," Jamie says distractedly.  She had expected that Watson would follow her lead without question, but she should have known better.  "It's the least regulated part of this lab, and the one place where no one would expect - or, I imagine, want -  to look."  She peers down the open space at the top of the barrel where the chute had been and smiles triumphantly.  The barrel is full of used needles and things that she doesn't care to touch, and there, at the very bottom, she can see the edges of a hard black rubber case.  Something waterproof and safe amidst a sea of hazards.

"And if they aren't there?"  Watson steps back as Jamie reaches for a surgical mask from where a box of them sit on top of the nearest worktable.  She pulls it on and cracks the top of the barrel using her multitool as a wedge and applying force around the lid.

She's grateful that Watson cannot see her scowl or her nervousness as she uses a pair of tongs from the work bench to reach down into the biohazard-marked bin.  She's got her arm perfectly still, three minutes until the guards come.  The tongs are slipping against the fine, thin leather of her gloves.  They will provide little protection, should something want to stick her. "Honestly, Watson, what about this man suggests that he is not a victim of his own vanity?"  The tongs close around the offending case and she tugs it free of its sharps and probably disease-encrusted container.  "They will be here."

Jamie tells herself that there's no way that they'd dispose of the drugs with the actual bio-hazardous material.  They do want to create a repeat market, after all, and no one wants a bunch of impossibly contagious meth-heads running around.

Two minutes.

Setting the tongs aside, Jamie crosses over to one of the sinks that runs across the far wall and begins to scrub off her arms and the case. She has to be able to touch it.  Her gloves get wet, and then start to feel fused with her skin.  She doesn’t care, she's done far worse in them.  It is only when she knows that they've less than a minute to go that she tucks the case into her pack and inclines her head to Watson.

Collins had found plans for this place over the summer, and last night he'd pointed out the route that the guards would take.  The plan hadn't really come into place until his sources had found out about Tenimont's meeting.  They had to go out the far door and up the stairs.

"One minute," she says, and Watson's eyes flick towards the door closest to them.  "We should go." She holds out her hand and by some miracle, Watson takes it

They do not see the guards come into the room, but they do hear them, until the heavy fire door on the stairwell swings closed and they're hurrying up the stairs two at a time.

Jamie strips off her gloves once the door is open.  The conference room is at the far end of this hallway, just around a corner and two floors up the main stairs.  She shoves her gloves into her pack and bends to crack open the still-damp case.  Inside there are maybe a hundred or so little baggies of a pure white substance that Jamie would never even consider touching.  Addiction is a crutch after all, and her mind needs to be sharp.

"That's ... is that heroin?" Watson obviously has not spent a great deal of time around the drugs her addicts use.  Jamie wrinkles her nose, the difference between the two should be obvious.

"Meth," Jamie replies, zipping the case closed save for one baggie that she tucks into her pocket.  She can see Watson's eyes widen and she shakes her head.  "Not for me," she adds, because such a weakness would be folly for one such as herself.  She is better than needing the crutch of addiction to escape her demons.  She's embraced them fully, offered to unleash them upon the world and honed her skill to unparalleled superiority.  "I need to make sure it was manufactured here."

"Where the hell else would they do it?"

"I've no idea."  She bites her lip, regarding Watson impassively. Her watch reads five ten, they're definitely in the conference room now, discussion their meager options and plotting Watson's downfall.  They're fools to think that Watson's death would bring about Jamie's fall.

The only thing that will do is bring about a clarity of mind that Jamie has not had in close to a year now.

She feels addled, looking at Watson now, guessing what Watson is thinking and dreading the moment that the admonishment drops from her lips. This is not something Jamie knows, it has been a very long time since she had been truly emotionally invested in another person.

"You should leave."

Watson's hand snakes out, hovering, but not touching over Jamie's upper arm.  "You can't do this," she says.

Christ, she knows, the implications of such an action are far-reaching.  The drugs in her pocket are a backup of a backup plan, an option not fully even considered as viable to this point.  A gun is so much simpler, cleaner.  Shoot until they are dead and pick up the pieces of what she will have done to Watson later.  "Are you going to stop me?"

Watson's eyes are wide and her fingers fall forward touch Jamie's arm.  Through her jacket and shirt, Jamie can feel the heat of those fingers and it is her damnation and her salvation. She tries to shake herself, to force herself to look away from Watson.  If she looks away perhaps she could go through with it.

She's never faltered before.

"Jamie, please, you can't."  Watson's voice is shaking, and her fingers are cupping Jamie's chin.  They have the evidence, that is all that Watson thinks they need.  Jamie knows better, knows these men and their games.  She must destroy them or they will never stop coming for Watson until she is dead.

Her lips break Jamie, tender and gentle and nothing like what she wants, like what this should only ever have a chance at being.  There is a hope in that gesture, and it is a hope she cannot have.  She can't do this, not the way that she'd planned.

Their foreheads are resting against each other, and Jamie tries to wrest her control out of Watson's gentle fingers.  "Walk away, Joan," she says, her breath a dull hiss against Watson's lips.

" _Jamie_."

Jamie takes a step back, schooling her expression from desperation into something dead and neutral.  The mask falls back into place easily, effortlessly.  "Walk away and be grateful that I do not put a bullet in your back for your trouble tonight, Watson."

Watson gives her a hard look, the sort of look that makes Jamie feel like she is splintering into a thousand pieces.  Her hand shakes around her gun’s grip and she's just barely holding herself together.  "Go," she urges, raising the gun to point between Watson's wide and frightened eyes. Her lips are moving, begging, silently, for Jamie to stop this.  It cannot be stopped, no matter how much Jamie wishes it to be.  These men must die one way or another. " _Please_."

She turns then, and it is only Jamie's shaking thumb on her left hand rising up to switch the safety on that keeps Jamie from pulling the trigger and ending this.  Watson raises her phone to her ear as she disappears around the corner of the hallway.  She does not look back, her coat swishing around the corner of the hallway and leaving Jamie alone to face her cruelty.

Jamie tucks the gun back into the waistband of her trousers and moves, silent and steady, up the final two flights of stairs, out of the stairwell, into the shadows.  The board room is at the very end of the hallway and there are two doors that lead into it.  She's got the schematic saved on her phone, but she doesn't think she'll need it for this.  Inside the pack, a backup plan of a backup plan sits.

Weighing the options as she moves forward, silent and cat-like, Jamie feels herself caught between two extremes.  She wants Tenimont dead.  She wants to cut away his skin and reveal what's underneath.  She wants to make him suffer.

But Watson would not want that, and Jamie cannot let whatever it is that exists between the two of them go just yet.

-

Sherlock and Marcus are outside with her ten minutes later.  Joan sits in Moriarty's beater car, her hands clasped in her lap to keep them from shaking.  She feels hollow, looking up at the lone illuminated window on the third floor and knowing, just knowing, that all that she had said will not be enough.  That no matter how much she'd pleaded for these men's lives, her words had fallen on deaf ears. She should have known better than to even try.

But she had to try, because she wouldn't have been able to live with herself if she hadn't.  The act of trying, perhaps this whole evening of misadventure and desperation had been just that.  Moriarty had made it clear that what had happened, no matter how much Joan had wanted to see the human in her, was a calculated risk on Joan's part.

Every time she closes her eyes, she's been waiting to see a muzzle flash and her life snuffed out. Sherlock's hand is warm and comforting on her shoulder, and Joan is stuck on how her mind feels almost violated by that parting.

Moriarty had set her gun on Joan, and Joan knows she would have pulled the trigger had Joan given her the impetus to do so.

"She threatened you," Sherlock had said as she'd all-but collapsed into his arms upon his arrival.  Theirs is not a physical relationship, not like that, so the need for contact is somewhat overwhelming for Joan.

Joan hadn’t the words to say that it was by the grace of some god she's never believed in that she'd gotten out of there alive.  She'd seen the look on Moriarty's face, something had stayed her hand.  Something had stopped her from shooting Joan in the back to save her own skin.  Something had stopped her from caving to the baser instincts that Joan knows she's ruled by.

"She did."

"A petty defense." Sherlock makes a disgusted noise, sucking at his teeth and scowling deeply.  Joan can see the mirror in their interactions now, how Sherlock has come face to face with this blank wall of incomprehensible confusion that Joan now finds herself staring down. The betrayal of a gun in her face, the doubt and the knowing, oh god, the knowing is a pain that she'd never thought she'd have to stomach.

She raises her hand to rub at her neck, at the mark that's still fresh and made with teeth and tongue.  She has sinned, she'd let her own blindness get in the way of what was right.  Sherlock glances down at her, he sees the mark and his eyes go wide.  Very little shocks him, but she knows she's done it now.  She tugs her jacket collar up over her sweater more firmly and shivers, watching Sherlock as he shifts, his expression going dark.

He knows what it means, and he doesn't approve.  She's never looked for his approval anyway.  It had been something she'd wanted to do, something she'd thought was right at the time.  And _god_ , how she'd wanted it.

Now she just feels guilty, a sinner who took her pleasure from the devil herself.  Sherlock sucks his teeth once more, before he turns to Marcus, his head shaking slightly and his hands jammed into his pockets.  Even in the semi-darkness, Joan can see that they're balled into fists. "Are the SWAT teams in yet?"

"Should be hearing any moment now."  Marcus turns back to his radio, his expression grim.  He fiddles with his earpiece, listening intently.  Joan knows Sherlock wishes to hear, but they need the element of surprise.  It's already been fifteen minutes and the people inside, save Moriarty, are surely all dead.

Joan braces herself for that pronouncement, because it is only with the actualization of her most dreaded fear that she will be able to push the shame away and know that she'd done all she can.  She will never see Moriarty again, after all.  Moriarty herself had made damn sure of that.

The radio crackles to life, and even though Marcus is wearing an earpiece, they can hear it over the stillness of the October night.  The SWAT team leader is shouting for EMS and needing something for a suspected overdose.  Marcus' expression is grim as he raises the radio to his lips and speaks quickly and efficiently, getting a status report and any information they're willing to give.  Joan can see his eyebrows climbing up his hairline as the static-riddled report comes in.

Something has shocked him, or at least surprised him.  Joan knows that whatever it is isn't right.  The pallor that comes across his dark skin, even in this low light, is enough to make Joan feel twitchy, awash with nervous energy.  She has to know.

"What's happened?" Sherlock leans forward to touch Marcus' arm when the report is finished.  Marcus' eyes look haunted, and his lips are set in thin, resolute line as he turns to Joan.

Joan feels a miserable urge to hide, a shameful admission of all the guilt.  She cannot be the strong, brave face she's put on for so long.  Not now, not ever again.

"They're not dead."

Color drains from Joan's face and Sherlock raises trembling fingers to cover his mouth.  Clearly this shocks him as well, for Joan had told him the score before she'd left to meet Moriarty, they'd both expected murder.  This is like Park, all over again, only somehow worse.  Joan's been building to the realization that there is no future in this, and it is a future that is truly dependent on Moriarty acting as Joan had been so sure she'd act.

How had she not killed them?  Where was Moriarty?

"And Moriarty?"  Her voice sounds hoarse, like she's been screaming, her resolve shattered to a million fragments beneath her feet.

She knows the answer before Marcus can confirm it.  "Gone."

Joan had seen the signs, but she'd chosen to ignore them.  The paints had all been closed, put away in neat plastic bins - and Moriarty's worktable was clear of papers.  It had seemed at the time a testament to her ordered mind, but if she was preparing to leave...

And the commissioner, she'd given up her blackmail material on him in exchange for Tenimont.  Joan lets out a bitter-sounding laugh and turns to Sherlock.  "She put all of her affairs in order before she came here.  Tied up loose ends."

"With you along?" He sounds incredulous. Joan supposes that it is a little odd, to lead anyone through the motions of her efforts to disappear. "That doesn’t seem like her."

"I know," Joan bites her lip and looks away, out and up at the T-MIT Pharm building.  She's not going to tell Marcus about the Commissioner, not until she gets Sherlock's opinion on the matter.  "This all started a year ago, when that uniform - Lin - saw that drug buy and they hired Sonny Park to ensure his silence.  Moriarty said they were manufacturing the meth that was sold here."

"In an actual pharmaceutical research facility?  That's fucking ballsy.  And shit, the place is being inspected by the FDA right now, there's no way."  Marcus shakes his head.  "They're trained to look for stuff like that."

"She was certain, and we found drugs in one of their biohazard drums."  Joan sighs.  It sounds insane now, just thinking about it, and she knows that Moriarty had known more than she was letting on about the operation here from the start.  She'd let them investigate; she'd given them bits of information, but not enough to get the full picture.  But why?  It didn't make sense.  "The FDA probably wouldn't have thought to look at what was being thrown out, and it takes what, twelve hours to cook a batch of meth?  They could do it over a weekend easily, especially if no one was around. This place is apparently mandated to be empty on the weekend."

They lapse into silence, all thinking about the implications of this.  It means so much, it means government scandal and implications that reach far beyond a simple corrupt drug company.  No, this could change laws.  This could change how the FDDA monitored such things.  Joan frowns, glancing at Sherlock.  She doesn't know what sort of a stake Moriarty has in such enterprises, but she wouldn't be surprised if she had one.  This is the most hostile of takeovers, pure and simple.

"Can we go in?"  Sherlock asks, gesturing up at the building, a pensive look on his face.  She knows that he wants to see it for himself before he will believe it.

"The stand down order's been given.  EMS is two minutes away.  Go look in there while the scene is preserved."  Marcus cracks a small smile.  "Whatever the hell you said to her to stop her from actually murdering those guys worked, good job."

She gives him a wan smile, but doesn't respond. She doesn't particularly feel like a hero.

Marcus nods to the uniformed officer posted at the door and they make sure to stick to the approved route as the SWAT team continues to sweep the building.  Joan can hear the distant barking of dogs towards the laboratory in the back.  They're probably going to find more cases like the one Moriarty found.

They arrive at the top floor conference room to see three men, bound and gagged with their shirt sleeves rolled up lying on the floor, heads lolling and eyes glassy.  They don't appear to notice the SWAT teams, or even Joan as she bends to check their vitals. Tenimont's pulse, in particular is thready. They were right to call EMS. He's bleeding from a knife wound to his thigh, but there's a strip of duct tape above the wound, slowing the bleeding like an afterthought. "They're high," Sherlock breathes, stepping aside as the first of the EMS responders cuts through the room, shouting and ordering they out of the way.

Joan remembers a packet of the drugs they'd found, slipped into Moriarty's pocket.  She sucks in a breath and turns to the conference table, getting out of the way of the arriving EMS techs as best she can.  On the end of the table there are eight bullets, all neatly lined in a row.

"She's kept one," Joan says, pointing at the space where the ninth bullet should be.  She cannot believe that Moriarty didn't kill them.  "Her gun has an eight-round magazine, one in the chamber."  Joan can't think of the model name.  A Walther maybe?  It was a European model, that much was for sure.  Sherlock would have known, but Joan was trying to avoid looking too hard at the gun until it was shoved in her face.

"And she didn't commit murder," Sherlock is rubbing his chin thoughtfully, but his eyes are fixed on the men on the floor.  Joan knows his body language well enough to know that this mirrors something that had been meant for him, taunting them in its simplicity.  "She didn't... because what she did was far worse instead."

The EMS team are yelling back and forth.  These men are old, they will probably not survive the overdose if they can't get them to a hospital and soon.  Sherlock's cheeks have gone pale, and his lips a thin line now.

"She... left the choice if they live or die up to the police."  Joan bites her lip, wanting to offer some comfort to Sherlock but saying nothing.  This isn't the place, or the time.  "Or rather how quickly the police can respond to something like this."

"An overdose like that would kill a healthy, young man nine times out of ten."  One of the EMTs got to his feet and came to stand before them. He looks so impossibly young, but he's clearly in control of the situation. "Do you know what they were given?"

Joan shakes her head, because she knows but does not know.  Moriarty had said it was meth, but Joan has never spent a great deal of time around its users, her clients had mostly used heroin or cocaine when she'd been a sober companion.  She couldn't actually tell and be certain.  It's then that she catches sight of it, the black rubber case just beside Tenimont's hand.  She points to it.  "It came from that case, probably, though.  I think Detective Bell has a testing kit with him.  Try for meth first; I have sources that say it was being manufactured here."

That statement earns Joan some raised eyebrows from the idling SWAT guys and the EMT.

"I've got one," one of the SWAT guys says, pulling open a cargo packet on his pant leg.  The ripping sound fills the largely silent room and Joan winces at the noise.  He tosses the small white case to the EMT.

The EMT has wide blue eyes and a slightly shocked expression on his face.  "This is a..." he glances down at the prone body of the third man, Joan is certain that it will not be long before he starts to seize, his body convulsing away the last of his life.  "They were the executive board of this company, weren't they?"

Joan nods.  "The guy with the silver hair is Marc Tenimont, I don't know who the others are."  The rest of the EMTs are hurrying the men from the scene, hauling gurneys and shouting at each other with numbers and phrases that Joan knows, and her fingers itch to help.  It isn't her place to do that anymore, no matter how strong the urge is.

The one guy remains, bending to help one of the SWAT guys photograph the case and then unzip it to take another baggie and start the test.  They're all watching him carefully, for drugs go missing all the time from chaotic crime scenes like this.  They have to be careful, ensure the chain of evidence.

"She meant to kill their minds."  Sherlock is still staring at the line of bullets.  He gestured to them, eyes fixed on Joan.  "She's taunting you, leaving the bullets she would have left in these men."

The mark on Joan's neck aches and she raises a hand to touch the sore skin.  It's bled into her shirt and she winces as her fingers press into the wound.  The pain grounds her, wakes her up as she approaches her twenty-fourth hour on three hours of sleep.  "It isn't a taunt."

"What is it then, Joan?"

Her smile is tired, sad even.  She meets Sherlock's gaze and pulls her hand away from the wound. "I think this is her saying that she respects my opinion."  She lets out a shaky little laugh.  It sounds as humorless as it feels.  "I told her that she couldn't kill them."

He lets out a humming noise, his expression pensive.

"I suppose it could be."

-

They don't leave the scene for hours.  Joan spends most of her time staring at the careful line of bullets on the conference table, her arms wrapped around herself and her expression pensive.  Sherlock drifts in and out, but she can see the lines of worry that have appeared at the corners of Sherlock's eyes and mouth.  There is self-loathing in his eyes and she knows exactly what he's thinking about.

Once, Moriarty had told him of the death she'd planned for him.  Neat, clean, an overdose that could easily be blamed on someone else, on Sherlock himself.

To be faced with Moriarty making that same choice, committing the very act that Sherlock was supposed to fall victim to, it must be devastating for him.

Joan doesn’t understand why Moriarty would do something like that in the first place.  The more she stares down at them, the more she thinks that it might actually be a taunt as Sherlock suggests - a clever ploy to pull Joan's mind from the task at hand and to force her to stay busy while Moriarty slips out of the city.

She tells Sherlock of her fears, but he shakes his head.  "She's already gone," he says.  "You played her game and you - you, my dear Watson - you forced her to consider another possibility.  One that did not involve murder and death."  His eyes crinkle at the corners, his expression nowhere near happy. "You did what you'd set out to do.  You changed the rules."

The shock of that realization sets Joan's mind whirling and it is not until much later, when she's sitting alone in a conference room with the recorders covered and the cameras turned off that she finally starts to process, maybe for the first time since the Sonny Park case.  Her hand aches as she writes, but she does not slow.  The lingering tension, the fear of Sonny Park, the fear that's lingered for close to a year, it feels different, gone like it had never been there in the first place.

She writes that down too.

Joan is completely honest in her witness statement this time.  She writes down every detail she can remember about the past two days, starting with Westin's murder and culminating the scene at T-MIT Pharm.  She fields a call from the police commissioner asking her to keep his name from the report, and Joan doesn't know what to say.  She tells him about how this has become a trend, her lying on sworn affidavits of fact.  And she'd like to stop.

Marcus doesn't take her witness statement.

Captain Gregson doesn’t either.  He lets the gentleman in and Joan sits across from the guy and eyes his impressive title for a long time before she finally starts to speak.  She's committed no crime, the man insists, because she was working under NYPD orders.  Marcus has already been chewed out by anyone who possesses a voice and informed by everyone from the police commissioner down that using Joan as a pawn for such an investigation was not the best idea.  Moriarty got away anyway, after all.  It was an unnecessary risk.

Joan had hugged him and told him that she didn't mind.  He'd told her she should get the really very spectacular hickey on her neck looked it before it got infected.  She'd let him have that jab, that one little dig about how Joan had been entirely willing to do all this.  He'd never tell anyone.

"I have no idea how she's getting her information," Joan finishes, palms lying flat on the table.  "I imagine that there is someone who works here that is on her payroll.  Probably multiple someones.  You'll never find them though."

Marc Tenimont might live yet.  The other two men, identified through their passport files on JFK's recent arrivals as Jean Luc Renard (a cousin, apparently, of their first PKE Group arrestee) and Douglas Griggs, a British ex-pat currently living in Paris are both dead.  They were older than Tenimont by a handful of years, and they had not had the pain of a knife wound to keep them somewhat in the present before they slipped into overdose-induced comas and eventually death.

"Do you know why she picked you, Joan?"

Once, Joan would have had that answer. Once, all this had made sense.  She'd beaten Moriarty at her own game and it is easy to cast someone like Moriarty as a petty criminal who would take offense to such a slight.  Now though, with marks on her body and on her soul that have yet to heal, Joan doesn’t think she can give a fair answer.

"I found her interesting."  It is the understatement of the century, but her interviewer seems to buy it more than her feigned indifference towards Moriarty and her worry. "And she found me interesting as well."

"Will she contact you again?"

Joan shakes her head.  "Our parting, as I've outlined in my statement, was rather final.  I doubt I'll hear from her again for some time, if ever."  It isn't a lie, more of a suspicion.  Moriarty, Joan guesses, will probably struggle with her inability to pull the trigger of her gun for some time. She'll want to avoid Joan until she understands why.  Sherlock is the same way.

"I have assurances from several individuals, including your fellow consultant, Mr. Holmes, that say that she and her organization are probably gone from the city.  Is that your assessment as well?"

"She'll never be truly gone."  Joan meets the man's inquisitive gaze evenly, knowing she must be honest.  "Sherlock would say she's like a bad foot fungus, but really she's just very engrained here.  Her organization, as far as I can tell, is far more European and African based.  Her presence here is because of me, because of Sherlock.  And I think she's let him go now."

"The commissioner has asked me to extend his gratitude for keeping the manner upon which you two met under wraps, again, Ms. Watson." And there is something dismissive about the way that he says 'miss' that makes Joan’s skin crawl.

"It’s doctor," she says, her mind made up on something that she hasn't thought of for a while: the endless debate in her mind, the want to help people but also the fear of holding a knife in her hand and accidentally killing someone else.  She has to face her fear or else she'll never live it down. "I may not be practicing, but I am still a doctor."

He inclines his head, and the interview continues.

Sherlock comes to meet her when she's let out of interrogation, and Marcus drives them home.  Joan is exhausted, half asleep against the passenger door as Sherlock and Marcus discuss the latest update on Tenimont's condition.  She doesn’t care that he'll probably pull through, or that someone has sent a whole dossier of information pulled from T-MIT's servers outlining the entire structure of the PKE Group.  All she cares about right now is a shower and sleep.

Sleep and forgetting.

When they get back, Joan makes her apologies to Marcus and tells Sherlock, who has already guessed the reason why Joan is giving her statement to a special interrogator, to fill him in on the details. She doesn't care that Marcus technically should not be allowed to know.  He deserves the truth, after all the lies Moriarty has made them tell him.

She makes her way sleepily upstairs and falls face first onto her bed, shower forgotten.

Sleep claims her and Joan does not dream.

-

A hand on her shoulder wakes Joan and she flails in the darkness of her bedroom.  Her eyes feel sticky, she hadn’t taken her contacts out and they’re smeary and dry against her eyes.   Everything is blurry.  She rolls over and reaches for the lamp, but the grip on her shoulder tightens and a low voice whispers 'no' in her ear.

Joan's heart pounds in her chest and she blinks furiously, trying to lubricate her contacts enough for them to work beyond the blur.  Slowly, slowly, the room filters into view.

Moriarty is sitting beside her on the bed, clad in a jacket that looks like exceedingly expensive military surplus.  Her hair is pulled back in a messy bun and her boots are scuffed and well-worn, the ones she’d been wearing before.  Earlier.  What day even is it?  She looks as dog-tired as Joan feels.

"Why are you here?"  The words tumble out of Joan's mouth and they feel wrong, inadequate.  Not enough.  She wants to ask why she didn't just shoot Tenimont and the others, but the look on Moriarty's face tells her everything that she needs to know about that. Moriarty looks haunted, her eyes wide and staring at Joan as though she's a ghost or something that should not be real, something that cannot be real. "I thought you'd left the city."

"I have to go away for a while," she says, her voice sounding distant.  "And..."  She purses her lips, looking at Joan in the semi-darkness and almost scowling at her.  Like she hates Joan for making her even want to do this.  Joan reasons that she probably does.  "I couldn't leave with so much unresolved between us."

"There isn't anything to resolve," Joan replies dully.  She won't let herself get drawn back in.

"You cannot honestly mean that, Joan."

"I do, Jamie.  There can never be anything between us because there never was anything between us."  Joan looks up at her, eyes hard and steady. She twists the knife with words, fighting back in a way that only she knows how.  Two can play that game as well. "Or did you forget that it is easier to fuck me than to understand me?"

"Darling, I--"

"Save it," Joan spits out.  The anger and the hurt and the sheer exhaustion of the day crushing her resolve to be polite, to speak her mind without raising her voice.  Because no, fuck her, fuck her and everything she'd allowed to dance so tantalizingly in front of Joan's eyes.  It could have been something, if they were different people, if the circumstances had been different. "You'll just lie."

"I suppose you're right."  She folds her hands on her lap, regarding Joan impassively.  "I did not want to leave without saying goodbye, though.  It will be some time before I return to New York, Joan.  I'd like to leave on as amicable terms as possible."  She tilts her head to one side. "I’d like to think that you can heal now."

"Because they're all dead?"

Moriarty shrugs.  "Or because the threat is no longer present.  Tenimont, unless something has changed, still lives.  Not for lack of trying on my part, but I know that you would not want that."  She smiles then, wide and brilliant.  "I left them alive so that you could see that."

"One was DOA at the hospital, and the other died not long after admittance.  Tenimont is in an induced coma and they're running dialysis on his blood just to make sure all the chemicals are gone before they attempt to wake him up."  Joan rolls her eyes, feeling disgusted.  "Next time just shot them, it would be kinder."

"Yes," Moriarty says almost distractedly.  Her fingernails are still flecked with blood. "I suppose that it would be."

“Why are you here?” Joan asks again.

And it is who Jamie leans down, her teeth flashing and her eyes dark with intent. It is as though everything that makes her so repugnant vanishes, and she looks like she could be a human after all. A human that Joan could have a deep passion for, had the circumstances been different. She’s just Jamie, a woman that Joan wants to understand but knows that she cannot.

For a moment, Joan thinks that Jamie might kiss her. She thinks that Jamie might try to push her luck and steal something not freely given.  But Jamie’s fingers merely rest, gentle and warm, on Joan’s cheek.  “I had wanted—” Jamie sucks in a deep breath of air and pushes forward once more.  “I had wanted to see you one last time, before I left.  You’ve been on my mind, Joan Watson, does that surprise you?”

Joan feels like a traitor, leaning into the touch and letting it linger like she’d fucked Jamie Moriarty more than once and like it had meant something.  “Not really,” she breathes.  “You’ve been on my mind as well.”

It is then, that the mask of Moriarty falls back into place, slamming down and icy cold.

“We’ll have to play our game again sometime, Joan Watson.”

Joan’s eyes flutter shut and Moriarty kisses her once before stepping away.  It feels like a promise and goodbye all at once.  She vanishes into the darkness of the far shadows of Joan’s bedroom and Joan is alone with her thoughts once more.

-

"You played her game," Sherlock says the next morning over breakfast.

Joan nods. "I changed the rules though."

It is a lie she has to tell herself, because when they butt heads, no one can win.

 

**Post –**

The postcard is battered, corners folded over and worn at the edges.  Like it’s been carried around for months and used as a bookmark before it was finally sent.  Joan handles it carefully, setting aside Sherlock’s copy of Scientific American and a Christmas card from a guy she hasn’t spoken to since she stopped practicing medicine.  The picture on the front is vintage, probably the forties by the looks of it, and depicts a snowy, mountain landscape.  The printing on the back is in German, but the postal code is from the Swiss Alps.  Joan stares at the neat script address of the brownstone and a short message written in a hand that shouldn’t be familiar.

It has been almost three months, a year to the day of Sonny Park’s appearance in their lives, since Moriarty has vanished without so much as a trace.  Interpol and a man called Sterling have taken over the case, but they’ve found nothing despite many hours of searching.  She’s gone to ground, or maybe merely retreated into her old habit of doing very little herself and relying on her henchmen and lieutenants to do most of the heavy lifting.

On it there are a series of numbers, a country code that Joan has never seen before.  A new phone number.

Joan puts the postcard away, tucking it into the book hidden at the back of her closet.  She’ll save it for a rainy day, when she wants a distraction and a game.  Now she wants something real, something that could have a future.

She sighs, fingering the binding of the book.

_This too, shall pass_ , the note inside the cover had read.

And pass it had.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here now, we have come to the end of this tale. This entirely too long and overly complicated tale. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Adventures into the headspace of Jamie Moriarty are rather... well they can be a lot, if I'm being honest. I hope I've done the characters justice and the cases justice too. There was a lot going on in this final installment and it stopped being so much a case fic and more of 'game' fic, if we are borrowing Moriarty's language. I hope everyone enjoyed it.
> 
> Special thank you to the usual suspects, who put up with me whining about this story for half a year. Hope you're all happy that it's finally done!


	6. (a start of something new)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for the timestamp meme on tumblr. one year later.

She finds the postcard and the book with the sketches tucked inside it. There’s a number of them now, bundled at the back of her closet. She pulls them out, the memories of teeth on her neck and guns in her face still smart. There are other memories now, Mycroft’s betrayal, another kidnapping, a new set of scars to riddle her body. She’s packing to move out of the brownstone now. She needs her own space, her own time to adjust to things. 

Sherlock’s taken a job at MI-6 now anyway. 

She stares down at the post card for a long time before tucking it into a notebook in her purse. She’s got nothing better to do now, perhaps she can finally puzzle out what exactly it is that went wrong between them. 

Her brother calls from downstairs. He’s borrowed a pickup from Jessie Song (who Joan really, really wishes her mother would stop trying to hook her up with) and is helping Marcus load her things into the back of it. There isn’t much. It’s all in storage. That’s all already done. 

"Joanie!" he calls up the stairs. "Are you coming?" 

"Yeah, hang on." Joan gathers the last of her things from the closet, the sketches held carefully in one hand, and slings her purse over her shoulder. Oren is waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. 

"What are those?" 

"Pictures, from a friend." 

Marcus, in the living room, goes stiff. Joan sees him move towards her slowly and is glad the book is put away where he can’t see it. It’s never easy to forget, and Marcus has a long memory. “You’re not still talking to her?” 

"Of course not," Joan replies testily. "She burned that bridge a long time ago." 

"What bridge?" Oren asks. 

Joan shakes her head. She’s not telling him about that whole misadventure. “It doesn’t matter.” 

Later, when she’s alone in her empty new apartment, Joan digs the book out of her purse and stares down with it. The inscription, the words she’s tried to burn into her memory over and over again since she found herself on the business end of a German-made pistol, is still there. She fingers the script for a moment and decides. 

She has no one to talk to tonight anyway. 

x

She’s in Thailand when the call comes in. It’s four in the morning. Tristin is sleeping beside her and Jamie is gripped with momentary self-loathing over his continued presence in her bed.  He was a good lover, but not a very bright one. Jamie keeps him around for his dick and little more.  She really should get rid of him. The promise of more after a brief respite had been her sole motivation for letting him linger, but jet lag and the sleep deficit that she’d been building for weeks now had lulled her to sleep. 

The number is from America, but she doesn’t recognize it. It’s not one of her people then. Her mind flashes to Sherlock, to Joan, and she slides sleep sluggish fingers over the screen to answer it, hoping no one is dead.

"Hello?" She sounds half asleep still. 

There’s breathing on the other line, an exhalation she’d recognize anywhere. 

"It’s me." 

"Joan…" Jamie breathes the name and Tristin rolls over, his beard scratches against her shoulder. He kisses her neck. Jamie’s skin crawls.  She feels dirty with this pretty man who likes to kill little children working in his minds so close to hear, Saint Joan Watson breathing in her ear.

She pushes him aside and gestures towards the door. He pouts. She glares. “I hadn’t expected to hear from you.” 

"I hadn’t expected to call." 

Tristin is sitting the edge of the bed now, naked and moodily typing his shoes. He’s trying to stay, listen in. Jamie watches him slowly hunt for his shirt and turn away.  She’ll have to try again, find someone else. Tristin isn’t long for this world, after all, she’d wanted to assume control of his mines anyway. “Then why are you calling?” 

"Sherlock’s gone." Watson sounds hollow, lost. 

That feeling, the void Sherlock leaves behind when he disappears, into a needle, into thin air, Jamie knows it well.  Tristin slams the door.  Jamie falls back onto the pillows.  Her thighs ache.  ”Oh,” she says.

"I found your post card today, going through some stuff."

Jamie’s lips twist into a smile, and she curls around the pillow beside her.  ”And you thought you’d call?  Really, Joan, I don’t understand you at all. We didn’t exactly part on good terms.”

An exhalation. 

"I know."

She’s lonely, Jamie realizes.

It’s a feeling she knows well.

"Coffee, my treat.  Next Thursday, ten o’clock?"  It would take her at least three days to slip back into New York once she finished here.  

And for all the hesitation and breathing that fills Jamie’s ear, a yes follows.

She falls asleep dreaming of reunions.


End file.
